Banding-free balanced SSFP cardiac cine using frequency modulation and phase cycle redundancy

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Medical Physics

Background:

• Balanced Steady-State Free Precession (SSFP) cardiac cine imaging is crucial for diagnosing heart conditions.
• Traditional SSFP methods can suffer from banding artifacts and require long acquisition times, often necessitating multiple breath-holds.
• Improving SSFP efficiency and artifact reduction is vital for clinical utility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel banding-free balanced SSFP cardiac cine imaging technique.
• To achieve cardiac imaging within a single breath-hold period.
• To eliminate the need for lengthy steady-state stabilization between acquisitions.

Main Methods:

• A frequency modulation scheme was designed for cardiac SSFP.
• Highly undersampled acquisitions were reconstructed using model-based reconstruction exploiting temporal and inter-phase cycle redundancy.
• Performance was evaluated using retrospective and prospective undersampling with and without frequency modulation.

Main Results:

• The proposed methods enabled balanced SSFP cardiac cine imaging in just 10 heartbeats.
• Images acquired with frequency modulation were comparable in quality to standard phase cycling.
• Combined temporal and inter-acquisition similarity constraints reduced errors by approximately 45% compared to temporal constraints alone.

Conclusions:

• Phase cycling can mitigate banding artifacts in balanced SSFP cardiac cine imaging under off-resonance conditions.
• The developed techniques allow for artifact-free balanced SSFP acquisitions in a single breath-hold.
• This advancement enhances the feasibility of SSFP for routine cardiac imaging.