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Updated: May 19, 2026
Pulmonary Structural MRI using Free-Breathing, Self-Gated Ultra-short Echo Time Imaging
Published on: September 6, 2024
Optimization of PROPELLER reconstruction for free-breathing T1-weighted cardiac imaging
Teng-Yi Huang1, Yu-Shen Tseng, Yu-Wei Tang
1Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan 106, Republic of China. tyhuang@mail.ntust.edu.tw
Purpose:
Clinical cardiac MR imaging techniques generally require patients to hold their breath during the scanning process to minimize respiratory motion-related artifacts. However, some patients cannot hold their breath because of illness or limited breath-hold capacity. This study aims to optimize the PROPELLER reconstruction for free-breathing myocardial T1-weighted imaging.
Methods:
Eight healthy volunteers (8 men; mean age 26.4 years) participated in this study after providing institutionally approved consent. The PROPELLER encoding method can reconstruct a low-resolution image from every blade because of k-space center oversampling. This study investigated the feasibility of extracting a respiratory trace from the PROPELLER blades by implementing a fully automatic region of interest selection and introducing a best template index to account for the property of the human respiration cycle.
Results:
Results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the contrast-to-noise ratio and the image sharpness (p < 0.05).
Conclusions:
The PROPELLER method is expected to provide a robust tool for clinical application in free-breathing myocardial T1-weighted imaging. It could greatly facilitate the acquisition procedures during such a routine examination.
