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Updated: Sep 23, 2025
Magnetic Resonance Imaging Quantification of Pulmonary Perfusion using Calibrated Arterial Spin Labeling
Published on: May 30, 2011
High-Resolution Free-Breathing Quantitative First-Pass Perfusion Cardiac MR Using Dual-Echo Dixon With
Joao Tourais1,2,3, Cian M Scannell4, Torben Schneider5
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Introduction:
To develop and test the feasibility of free-breathing (FB), high-resolution quantitative first-pass perfusion cardiac MR (FPP-CMR) using dual-echo Dixon (FOSTERS; Fat-water separation for mOtion-corrected Spatio-TEmporally accelerated myocardial peRfuSion).
Materials And Methods:
FOSTERS was performed in FB using a dual-saturation single-bolus acquisition with dual-echo Dixon and a dynamically variable Cartesian k-t undersampling (8-fold) approach, with low-rank and sparsity constrained reconstruction, to achieve high-resolution FPP-CMR images. FOSTERS also included automatic in-plane motion estimation and T correction to obtain quantitative myocardial blood flow (MBF) maps. High-resolution (1.6 x 1.6 mm2) FB FOSTERS was evaluated in eleven patients, during rest, against standard-resolution (2.6 x 2.6 mm2) 2-fold SENSE-accelerated breath-hold (BH) FPP-CMR. In addition, MBF was computed for FOSTERS and spatial wavelet-based compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction. Two cardiologists scored the image quality (IQ) of FOSTERS, CS, and standard BH FPP-CMR images using a 4-point scale (1-4, non-diagnostic - fully diagnostic).
Results:
FOSTERS produced high-quality images without dark-rim and with reduced motion-related artifacts, using an 8x accelerated FB acquisition. FOSTERS and standard BH FPP-CMR exhibited excellent IQ with an average score of 3.5 ± 0.6 and 3.4 ± 0.6 (no statistical difference, p > 0.05), respectively. CS images exhibited severe artifacts and high levels of noise, resulting in an average IQ score of 2.9 ± 0.5. MBF values obtained with FOSTERS presented a lower variance than those obtained with CS.
Discussion:
FOSTERS enabled high-resolution FB FPP-CMR with MBF quantification. Combining motion correction with a low-rank and sparsity-constrained reconstruction results in excellent image quality.
