Authors: Abdallah G Motaal Nils Noorman Wolter L de Graaf Verena Hoerr Luc M J Florack Klaas Nicolay Gustav J Strijkers
Publish Date: 2014/09/10
Volume: 31, Issue: 1, Pages: 83-94
Abstract
We introduce a fast protocol for ultrashort echo time UTE Cine magnetic resonance imaging MRI of the beating murine heart The sequence involves a selfgated UTE with goldenangle radial acquisition and compressed sensing reconstruction The selfgated acquisition is performed asynchronously with the heartbeat resulting in a randomly undersampled ktspace that facilitates compressed sensing reconstruction The sequence was tested in 4 healthy rats and 4 rats with chronic myocardial infarction approximately 2 months after surgery As a control a nonaccelerated selfgated multislice FLASH sequence with an echo time TE of 276 ms 45 signal averages a matrix of 192 × 192 and an acquisition time of 2 min 34 s per slice was used to obtain Cine MRI with 15 frames per heartbeat Nonaccelerated UTE MRI was performed with TE = 029 ms a reconstruction matrix of 192 × 192 and an acquisition time of 3 min 47 s per slice for 35 averages Accelerated imaging with 2× 4× and 5× undersampled ktspace data was performed with 1 min 30 and 15 s acquisitions respectively UTE Cine images up to 5× undersampled ktspace data could be successfully reconstructed using a compressed sensing algorithm In contrast to the FLASH Cine images flow artifacts in the UTE images were nearly absent due to the short echo time simplifying segmentation of the left ventricular LV lumen LV functional parameters derived from the control and the accelerated Cine movies were statistically identical
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