High resolution single-shot myocardial imaging using bSSFP with wave encoding

Single-shot balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) sequence is widely used in cardiac imaging. However, the limited scan time in one heartbeat greatly hinders its spatial resolution compared to the segmented acquisition mode. Therefore, a highly accelerated single-shot bSSFP imaging technology is needed for clinical use.

To develop and evaluate a wave-encoded bSSFP sequence with high acceleration rates for single-shot myocardial imaging.

The proposed Wave-bSSFP method is implemented by adding a sinusoidal wave gradient in the phase encoding direction during the readout of bSSFP sequence. Uniform undersampling is used for acceleration. Its performance was first validated via phantom studies by comparison with conventional bSSFP. Then it was evaluated in volunteer studies via anatomical imaging, T₂ -prepared bSSFP, and T₁ mapping in in-vivo cardiac imaging. All methods were compared with accelerated conventional bSSFP reconstructed using iterative SENSE and compressed sensing (CS), to demonstrate the advantage of wave encoding in suppressing the noise amplification and artifacts induced by acceleration.

The proposed Wave-bSSFP method achieved a high acceleration factor of 4 for single-shot acquisitions. The proposed method showed lower average g-factors than bSSFP, and fewer blurring artifacts than CS reconstruction. The Wave-bSSFP with R = 4 achieved higher spatial and temporal resolutions compared with the conventional bSSFP with R = 2 in several applications such as T₂ -prepared bSSFP and T₁ mapping, and could be applied in systolic imaging.

Wave encoding can be used to highly accelerate 2D bSSFP imaging with single-shot acquisitions. Compared with the conventional bSSFP sequence, the proposed Wave-bSSFP method can effectively reduce the g-factor and aliasing artifacts in cardiac imaging.