Pascal Spincemaille1, Thanh Dang Nguyen1, Martin Prince1, Yi Wang1
1Radiology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, USA
Coronary MRA routinely uses a diaphragm navigator combined with slice tracking to enhance navigator gating efficiency. The actual heart displacement is calculated from a linear model. Any breakdown in this correlation (such as in the case of hysteresis), degrades image quality. The cardiac fat navigator, which tracks epicardial fat, provides a direct measure of heart motion so that slice tracking does not require correction or calibration factors as is needed when cardiac motion is extrapolated from diaphragm motion. In this study, the slice tracking cardiac fat navigator with an enlarged gating window was found to improve scanning efficiency without affecting image quality.