Experimental study of the effects of "fractional" gating on flow measurements

Velocity encoded phase imaging is subject to errors from phase and amplitude variations of the k-space data caused by beat-to-beat variations of the flow. Fractional cardiac gating is defined as asynchronous gating with each phase encode step occupying a fixed fraction of the RR interval. The gating fraction is the inverse of the number of phase encode steps taken per RR interval. Studies in normal subjects show that deviations and standard errors of ascending and descending aorta flow measurements are significantly greater with decreased gating fraction. Significant errors occur when gating does not separate systolic and diastolic data. The studies establish a graded trade-off between flow measurement accuracy and precision with imaging time, and show that standard nongated phase contrast measurements of strongly pulsatile flow are unreliable.