Whole-heart spiral simultaneous multi-slice first-pass myocardial perfusion imaging

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Background:

• Simultaneous multislice (SMS) imaging accelerates MRI acquisition by exciting and acquiring data from multiple slices concurrently.
• Whole-heart coverage is crucial for comprehensive assessment of cardiac perfusion.
• Spiral acquisition offers fast data acquisition, beneficial for dynamic perfusion studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a novel simultaneous multislice (SMS) spiral perfusion pulse sequence.
• To achieve whole-heart coverage with high-quality cardiac perfusion imaging.
• To assess the performance of SMS spiral perfusion at various multiband (MB) factors.

Main Methods:

• Developed an SMS spiral perfusion sequence incorporating a Hadamard pattern for phase cycling.
• Utilized a golden-angle (GA) variable density spiral trajectory.
• Reconstructed images using an SMS extension of L1-SPIRiT, termed SMS-L1-SPIRiT.
• Evaluated the sequence in 40 subjects across MB factors of 1, 2, 3, and 4.
• Performed retrospective simulations to assess reconstruction accuracy.

Main Results:

• The SMS sampling strategy effectively canceled aliasing from interfering slices.
• SMS-L1-SPIRiT reconstruction demonstrated excellent agreement with non-SMS ground-truth images.
• Clinical evaluation yielded high image quality scores (average 4.2-4.4) across MB factors 2, 3, and 4.
• No significant difference in image quality was observed between different MB factors (P=0.38).

Conclusions:

• SMS spiral perfusion with whole-heart coverage is feasible and produces high-quality images.
• The developed technique achieves high sampling efficiency at MB factors 2, 3, and 4.
• This method offers a promising approach for efficient cardiac perfusion assessment.