Single breath-hold whole heart coronary MRA with isotropic spatial resolution using highly-accelerated parallel imaging with a 32-element coil array

Abstract

Introduction Whole heart coronary MRA (CMRA) is typically performed with navigator gating because of the extensive data acquisition needed to achieve an isotropic spatial resolution on the order of 1-2 mm3 with full anatomic coverage (10-16 cm). Previous studies have shown that whole heart CMRA can be performed with either a single [1] or double [2,3] breath-hold (BH) approach using highlyaccelerated parallel imaging. The single breath-hold approach [1] acquires the coil sensitivity data immediately before and after the coronary MRA data within the same cardiac cycle, whereas the double BH approach acquires coil sensitivity data in a separate BH. The single BH approach lengthens the time between the T2 and fat suppression pulses to the image acquisition, and the double BH approach may suffer from misregistration. We propose to acquire the coil sensitivity and coronary MRA data in two separate cardiac phases (early systole and mid diastole, respectively) both within a single BH, in order to circumvent the aforementioned problems.