title: Coronary artery magnetic resonance imaging: a patient-tailored approach.
abstract: Coronary artery magnetic resonance imaging strategies have tended to focus on the use of a single method performed during either breath-holding or free-breathing for all patients. However, significant variations exist among patients in terms of breath-holding ability and respiratory regularity that make the use of a single technique alone not universally successful. Therefore, it is prudent to make available a number of magnetic resonance imaging methods such that an appropriate respiratory motion reduction strategy can be tailored to suit the patient's respiratory pattern and characteristics. A tailored approach that can draw on different image acquisition techniques for coronary artery imaging is presented. A decision tree is proposed to triage patients into imaging regimes with the greatest probability of success, according to the patient's ability to breath-hold or exhibit steady respiration. Methods include volume free-breathing acquisitions using navigator echoes for respiratory monitoring in the 8- to 10-min scan time range, two-dimensional spiral navigators (2- to 3-min scan time), breath-held multislice and vessel-tracking spirals (16- to 20-second scan time), and real-time imaging approaches incorporating adaptive signal averaging. The development of multiple acquisition strategies substantially improves the opportunities to generate high-quality, diagnostic images of the coronary arteries.
authors.affiliation: Applied Science Laboratory, GE Medical Systems, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
authors.forename: T K
authors.initials: TK
authors.lastname: Foo
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Saranathan
authors.forename: C J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Hardy
authors.forename: V B
authors.initials: VB
authors.lastname: Ho
mesh_terms: D003327:Coronary Disease / Q000175:diagnosis*; D003331:Coronary Vessels / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D018810:Magnetic Resonance Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D018802:Patient-Centered Care; D012119:Respiration; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity