title: High-resolution 3D whole-heart coronary MRA: a study on the combination of data acquisition in multiple breath-holds and 1D residual respiratory motion compensation.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To study a scan protocol for coronary magnetic resonance angiography based on multiple breath-holds featuring 1D motion compensation and to compare the resulting image quality to a navigator-gated free-breathing acquisition. Image reconstruction was performed using L1 regularized iterative SENSE.
  
  
  METHODS
  The effects of respiratory motion on the Cartesian sampling scheme were minimized by performing data acquisition in multiple breath-holds. During the scan, repetitive readouts through a k-space center were used to detect and correct the respiratory displacement of the heart by exploiting the self-navigation principle in image reconstruction. In vivo experiments were performed in nine healthy volunteers and the resulting image quality was compared to a navigator-gated reference in terms of vessel length and sharpness.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Acquisition in breath-hold is an effective method to reduce the scan time by more than 30% compared to the navigator-gated reference. Although an equivalent mean image quality with respect to the reference was achieved with the proposed method, the 1D motion compensation did not work equally well in all cases.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In general, the image quality scaled with the robustness of the motion compensation. Nevertheless, the featured setup provides a positive basis for future extension with more advanced motion compensation methods.
authors.affiliation: Pattern Recognition Lab, Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany, Christoph.Forman@fau.de.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Forman
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Piccini
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Grimm
authors.forename: Jana
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hutter
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hornegger
authors.forename: Michael O
authors.initials: MO
authors.lastname: Zenge
mesh_terms: D055424:Cardiac-Gated Imaging Techniques / Q000379:methods*; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006321:Heart / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D018810:Magnetic Resonance Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D009068:Movement; D055425:Respiratory-Gated Imaging Techniques / Q000379:methods*