Single breath-hold CINE imaging with combined simultaneous multislice and region-optimized virtual coils

To investigate the feasibility of combining simultaneous multislice (SMS) and region-optimized virtual coils (ROVir) for single breath-hold CINE imaging.

ROVir is a recent virtual coil approach that allows reduced-field of view (FOV) imaging by localizing the signal from a region-of-interest (ROI) and/or suppressing the signal from unwanted spatial regions. In this work, ROVir is used for reduced-FOV SMS bSSFP CINE imaging, which enables whole heart CINE with a single breath-hold acquisition.

Reduced-FOV CINE with either SMS-only or ROVir-only resulted in significant aliasing, with severely reduced image quality when compared to the full FOV reference CINE, while the visual appearance of aliasing was substantially reduced with the proposed SMS+ROVir. The end diastolic volume, end systolic volume, and ejection fraction obtained using the proposed approach were similar to the clinical reference (correlations of 0.92, 0.94, and 0.88, respectively with $$ in each case, and biases of 0.1, 1.6 mL, and $$ , respectively). No statistically significant differences for these parameters were found with a Wilcoxon rank test (p = 0.96, 0.20, and 0.40, respectively).

We demonstrated that reduced-FOV CINE imaging with SMS+ROVir enables single breath-hold whole-heart imaging without compromising visual image quality or quantitative cardiac function parameters.