Behzad Sharif1, Rohan Dharmakumar1, Chrisandra Shufelt2, Troy LaBounty2, Louise Thomson2, Noel Bairey Merz2, Daniel S. Berman2, Debiao Li1
1Biomedical Imaging Research Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 2Heart Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Current clinical myocardial perfusion MR methods suffer from image artifacts that reduce diagnostic accuracy, specifically the so-called subendocardial dark-rim artifact (DRA). DRAs are caused by multiple factors and mimic subendocardial perfusion deficits, and are especially limiting since they can reduce the sensitivity/specificity of detecting subendocardial perfusion deficits. In this work, we demonstrate that projection imaging of first-pass cardiac perfusion MR is robust to Gibbs ringing, which is a major cause of DRAs; thereby proposing radial k-space sampling as the preferred acquisition scheme for DRA-free perfusion imaging.
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