Rapid Fat-Water-Separated Cardiac Cine Imaging using Concentric Rings & K-T BLAST

Holden H. Wu^1,2, Taehoon Shin², Dwight G. Nishimura², Michael V. McConnell^1,2

Cine MRI is routinely used to assess cardiac function. In many situations, it is also desirable to have complementary information identifying fat signal to characterize masses, detect fatty infiltration and arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia, and visualize pericardial disease. In this work we present a rapid imaging technique using the concentric rings readout trajectory to efficiently encode chemical shift information for fat/water separation and k-t BLAST acceleration to flexibly balance spatial and temporal sampling requirements. Experimental results demonstrate that co-registered 2D fat/water cines can be obtained at 1.78-mm in-plane spatial resolution and 41-ms temporal resolution within a 10-hearbeat single-breath-hold scan.