Abstract #0363

Spincemaille P, Nguyen T, Prince M, Wang Y

The objective of this study is to demonstrate the feasibility of employing the recently developed cardiac fat navigator in free-breathing SSFP 3D coronary MRA. The time delay between the navigator echo and the imaging echoes is reduced to approximately 24 ms by eliminating the need for a separate fat saturation pulse and by using a fast Kaiser ramp preparation with 6 RF pulses. Our preliminary human study (n = 11) shows that this approach provides better image quality than both the &[alpha]/2 preparation (p<0.0025) and the linear ramp preparation with 20 RF pulses (p<0.025).