Improved Retrospective Self-Gated Human Lung Imaging using a Quasi Random Sampling Scheme

Stefan Weick¹, Philipp Ehses², Martin Blaimer², Felix A. Breuer², Peter M. Jakob^1,2

In this work, the human lung was examined under free breathing conditions using the k-space center signal for retrospective respiratory self-gating. The partition and phase encoding of a 3D FLASH sequence were played out in a quasi-random order. The quasi-random sampling results in improved ghost artifact reduction and leads to a very uniformly distribution of missing lines in k-space enabling successful iterative GRAPPA reconstruction. It is shown that the combination of retrospective self-gating with quasi-random sampling is a more robust strategy than the combination with conventional sampling allowing for better image quality in shorter scan time.