Improved Simultaneous Multi-Slice Imaging for Perfusion Cardiac MRI Using Outer Volume Suppression and Regularized Reconstruction
Omer Burak Demirel (University of Minnesota Twin Cities)
Sebastian Weingärtner (University of Minnesota Twin Cities, TU Delft - ImPhys/Medical Imaging, TU Delft - ImPhys/Computational Imaging)
Steen Moeller (University of Minnesota Twin Cities)
Mehmet Akcakaya (University of Minnesota Twin Cities)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Perfusion cardiac MRI (CMR) is a radiation-free and noninvasive imaging tool which has gained increasing interest for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. However, resolution and coverage are limited in perfusion CMR due to the necessity of single snap-shot imaging during the first-pass of a contrast agent. Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging has the potential for high acceleration rates with minimal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss. However, its utility in CMR has been limited to moderate acceleration factors due to residual leakage artifacts from the extra-cardiac tissue such as the chest and the back. Outer volume suppression (OVS) with leakage-blocking reconstruction has been used to enable higher acceleration rates in perfusion CMR, but suffers from higher noise amplification. In this study, we sought to augment OVS-SMS/MB imaging with a regularized leakage-blocking reconstruction algorithm to improve image quality. Results from highly-accelerated perfusion CMR show that the method improves upon SMS-SPIRiT in terms of leakage reduction and split slice (ss)-GRAPPA in terms of noise mitigation.