Respiratory motion of the heart: kinematics and the implications for the spatial resolution in coronary imaging

Respiratory motion is a major limiting factor in improving image resolution and signal-to-noise ratio in MR coronary imaging. In this work the effects of respiration on the cardiac position were studied quantitively by imaging the heart during diastole at various positions of tidal respiration with a breath-hold segmented fast gradient echo technique. It was found that during tidal breathing the movement of the heart due to respiration is dominated by superior-inferior (SI) motion, which is linearly related to the SI motion of the diaphragm. The motion of the heart due to respiration is approximately a global translation. These results provide motivation for employing adaptive motion correction techniques to reduce image blurring in nonbreath-hold coronary MR imaging.