Cartesian Whole-Heart Coronary MRA Using Interleaved Auxiliary Image Acquisition and 3D Affine Motion Correction

Markus Henningsson¹, Claudia Prieto¹, Rene M. Botnar¹

We developed a novel respiratory motion correction technique for Cartesian whole-heart coronary MRA (CMRA) using 3D affine transformation which allows for data acquisition with 100% efficiency. Fully sampled, low resolution auxiliary images are acquired for different respiratory bins, interleaved with high resolution CMRA images. Correction is performed in image space by registering each auxiliary image (bin 2-4) to the end-expiratory image (bin1), thereafter applying the calculated transformation to the corresponding CMRA images which have been similarly binned. The proposed method, with 100% gating efficiency, shows comparable image quality to a 7mm gated scan with 1D FH correction (average gating efficiency=55%).