Comparison of Physiological Trigger Modes for DWI in the Abdomen

Tobias Binser¹, Harriet C. Thoeny², Chris Boesch¹, Peter Vermathen¹

A major problem in abdominal diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is related to physiological motion artifacts caused by respiration and cardiac pulsation. In the present study we compared different physiological triggering methods, namely respiratory versus combined respiratory-cardiac gating techniques in DWI of the kidney. The main objective was to evaluate if respiratory-cardiac double triggering is advantageous for the determination of diffusion parameters, especially for the stability of microperfusion components in addition to apparent diffusion coefficients (ADC). The results from repeated measurements show a significant improvement of data stability for respiratory-cardiac double triggering over respiratory triggering alone.