Self-Gated Free Breathing 3D Coronary Cine Imaging with Enhanced Artery Contrast by Exploiting the Simultaneously Obtained Water & Fat Visualization

Jing Liu¹, Thanh D. Nguyen¹, Yanchun Zhu¹, Pascal Spincemaille¹, Jonathan W. Weinsaft¹, Martin R. Prince¹, Yi Wang¹

A respiratory and cardiac self-gated free-breathing 3D cine SSFP imaging technique provides both water and fat visualization of the coronary arteries. Multi-echo hybrid radial sampling has been approved to be high efficient at data acquisition and robust to motion. It has been exploited for generating self-gating signals without extra cost of scan time, by mapping the k-space center along the slice encoding direction intensity-weighted position information, from which both respiratory and cardiac motions are derived. In this study, data sets at different echo times are exploited for separating water and fat signals. The conventional coronary imaging techniques acquire data during a limited acquisition window at the middle diastolic phase, which requires subject dependent trigger delay. And the preparation pulses such as navigation pulse, fat and myocardium suppression pulses interrupt the steady states and cause artifacts. Our proposed water and fat separation based self-gated cine image technique have the advantages of avoiding the extra requirements and preparation pulses. Combination of the water and fat images improves the coronary artery contrast.