Highly efficient 3D motion-compensated abdomen MRI from undersampled golden-RPE acquisitions

A common approach to compensate for respiratory motion in free-breathing 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is navigator gating where MRI data is only acquired when the respiratory signal coincides within a small predefined acceptance window. However, this leads to poor scan efficiency and prolonged scan times. Here, we propose a method to reconstruct motion-compensated 3D MRI of the abdomen acquired during free-breathing with nearly 100% scan efficiency without increasing scan time.

The approach is based on a self-gated golden-radial phase encoding sampling scheme that allows for the reconstruction of multiple undersampled 3D images at different respiratory positions. Non-rigid image registrations and time-wise motion field interpolations are employed to form 3D motion models that combine all low-quality images into one high-quality motion-compensated image.

Our highly efficient technique allows reconstruction of 3D liver MRI with a high isotropic resolution of 1.75 mm from a short acquisition of 1.1 min. The approach is validated in 10 healthy volunteers by comparing image quality to data sets acquired with a self-gating approach.

Our method reduces scan time by 56% compared to the gating technique while similar image quality is preserved.