Gastao Cruz1, David Atkinson2, Markus Henningsson1, René Botnar1, and Claudia Prieto1
Non-invasive visualization of both coronary lumen and vessel wall is
desired for assessment of coronary atherosclerosis. An interleaved acquisition
was recently proposed to obtain both 3D images with MRI. However, this approach
is susceptible to motion artifacts and dual respiratory gating results in
long and unpredictable scan times. Here, we propose a ~100% scan efficiency,
two-step motion correction method using translational and nonrigid correction
to produce co-registered coronary lumen and vessel wall images. The proposed
method shows significant improvements over translational correction and similar
lumen quality to a reference navigator-gated (6mm) scan, despite a scan time
reduction of ~1.8x.
