Ultrashort Echo Time (UTE) MR Lung Imaging with Respiratory Motion Compensation

Jiangsheng Yu¹, Yiqun Xue¹, Hamidreza Saligheh Rad¹, Hee Kwon Song¹

Ultra-short echo time (UTE) MRI has been successfully applied to lung imaging, but so far the issue of respiratory motion during imaging the lung parenchyma has not yet been addressed. In this work, a respiratory motion-compensated UTE lung MRI technique is presented. This technique applies the golden-angle view increment strategy in conjunction with respiratory self-gating to reconstruct images at different respiratory phases to reduce respiratory motion artifacts. The in-vivo results demonstrate that lung image quality is significantly enhanced with improved visualization and delineation of lung vasculature, as well as improved SNR, as compared to conventional gradient echo images.