Single breath-hold 3D LGE using stack of spiral trajectory

Abstract

Background Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) imaging is the gold standard for noninvasive evaluation of myocardial scar. In the clinical setting, the standard imaging protocol involves a breath-held segmented inversion-prepared 2D Cartesian acquisition at a single location. This breathhold scan is repeated 10 -14 times to cover the entire left ventricle. Although multislice 2D LGE has shown great diagnostic accuracy, the multiple breath-holds increase the scan time to approximately 10min and patient fatigue which can result in poor breath-holding and ghosting artifact. In this study, we propose to perform the 3D LGE imaging in a single breath-hold using a stack of spiral trajectory. Methods Single breath-hold 3D stack of spiral LGE images covering the entire LV were acquired in 27 subjects undergoing clinical scans following the conventional multisilce 2D LGE on a Siemens 1.5T Avanto scanner. The 3D spiral LGE sequence consisted of 12 partitions of a dual density spiral trajectory. Each spiral readout was 4ms long with 24 interleaves to support 1.5x Nyquist in the center and 0.7x Nyquist in the edge of kspace. At each cardiac cycle, 2 out of 24 interleaves were acquired for each partition resulting in an acquisition window of approximately 160ms. All of the spirals were acquired in a single 12 heart beat breath-hold. Other sequence parameters included: TR 7ms, TE 1ms, TI 300~400ms, FA 20, FOV 340mm, in-plane resolution 1.5mm, 12 slices, and thickness 8mm. The images