Late gadolinium enhancement imaging using spiral readouts at 3T

Abstract

Background Breath-hold late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) imaging is commonly performed as a stack of 2D short-axis slices through the ventricles. Standard inversion recovery with Cartesian k-space coverage requires long acquisition windows of 140 200 ms which have potential to introduce artefacts due to longitudinal magnetisation recovery and blurring due to cardiac motion. Ghosting in the phase encoding direction from beat-to-beat signal variations and due to poor breath-holding may mimic enhancement and a phase swapped (PS) stack of slices is also acquired to confirm diagnosis, although this doubles the scan time. Spiral data acquisition provides highly efficient coverage of k-space and would potentially allow a significant reduction of the acquisition window. This would reduce motion blurring and edge artefacts while at the same time, may eliminate the need for PS acquisitions. Its use for 2D LGE was investigated.