Highly accelerated cardiac cine phase-contrast MRI using an undersampled radial acquisition and temporally...

To evaluate a method to enable single-slice or multiple-slice cine phase contrast (cine-PC) acquisition during a single breath-hold using a highly sparsified radial acquisition ordering and temporally constrained image reconstruction with a spatially varying temporal constraint.

Simulated and in vivo cine-PC datasets of the proximal ascending aorta were obtained at different acceleration factors using a view projection acquisition order optimized for temporally constrained reconstruction (TCR). Reconstruction of the sparse cine-PC data performed with TCR was compared to reconstructions using zero-filled regridding and temporal interpolation.

TCR resulted in more accurate velocity measurements than regridding or temporal interpolation. In one dataset, TCR of undersampled in vivo data (16 views per cardiac phase) resulted in a peak systolic velocity within 3.3% of the value measured by Doppler ultrasound while shortening the scan time to 13 seconds. High temporal-resolution undersampled TCR was also compared lower temporal-resolution, more highly sampled, regridding in three normal volunteers.

TCR proved to be an effective method for reconstructing undersampled radial PC data. Although TCR utilizes a temporal constraint, temporal blurring was minimized by using appropriate constraint weights in addition to a spatially varying temporal constraint. TCR allowed for the acquisition time to be reduced to the duration of a breath-hold, while still resulting in accurate velocity measurements.