Technical note: Accelerated nonrigid motion-compensated isotropic 3D coronary MR angiography

Purpose: To develop an accelerated and nonrigid motion-compensated technique for efficient isotropic 3D whole-heart coronary magnetic resonance angiography (CMRA) with Cartesian acquisition.

Methods: Highly efficient whole-heart 3D CMRA was achieved by combining image reconstruction from undersampled data using compressed sensing (CS) with a nonrigid motion compensation framework. Undersampled acquisition was performed using a variable-density Cartesian trajectory with radial order (VD-CAPR). Motion correction was performed in two steps: beat-to-beat 2D translational correction with motion estimated from interleaved image navigators, and bin-to-bin 3D nonrigid correction with motion estimated from respiratory-resolved images reconstructed from undersampled 3D CMRA data using CS. Nonrigid motion fields were incorporated into an undersampled motion-compensated reconstruction, which combines CS with the general matrix description formalism. The proposed approach was tested on 10 healthy subjects and compared against a conventional twofold accelerated 5-mm navigator-gated and tracked acquisition.

Results: The proposed method achieves isotropic 1.2-mm Cartesian whole-heart CMRA in 5 min ± 1 min (~8× acceleration). The proposed approach provides good-quality images of the left and right coronary arteries, comparable to those of a twofold accelerated navigator-gated and tracked acquisition, but scan time was up to about four times faster. For both coronaries, no significant differences (P > 0.05) in vessel sharpness and length were found between the proposed method and reference scan.

Conclusion: The feasibility of a highly efficient motion-compensated reconstruction framework for accelerated 3D CMRA has been demonstrated in healthy subjects. Further investigation is required to assess the clinical value of the method.