Respiratory Triggered Retrospectively Cardiac Gated Cine Steady-State Free Precession (SSFP) Imaging

Amol Pednekar¹, Ramkumar Krishnamurthy², Claudio Arena³, Raja Muthupillai³, Benjamin Cheong³, Debra Dees³

We propose a free breathing respiratory triggered multi-shot cardiac cine SSFP technique with a drive to steady state at each expiration phase and retrospective cardiac gating. Our initial evaluation in normal subjects shows that slice-by-slice LV volumes estimated using this free breathing technique are comparable to the LV volumes obtained using conventional, breath-hold cardiac cine SSFP techniques. The combination of respiratory triggering, multi-shot acquisition, and retrospective cardiac gating may make this approach particularly useful in patients with severely compromised breath holding capability and moderate arrhythmia. Further allowing high spatial and/or temporal resolution cardiac cine imaging.