John P. Mugler, III1, Talissa A. Altes1, Iulian C. Ruset2,3, Stephen Ketel3, Jan H. Distelbrink3, Yulin Chang1, Jaime F. Mata1, F William Hersman2,3, Kai Ruppert1, Isabel M. Dregely2
1Radiology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA; 2Physics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA; 3Xemed, LLC, Durham, NH, USA
The purpose of this work was to explore the potential of using a 3D steady-state free-precession (SSFP) pulse sequence for ventilation imaging with Xe129. We found that an optimized implementation of 3D-SSFP imaging combined with ~0.5 L of Xe129 polarized to 20% provided good quality 3D ventilation images of the lung with 6-mm isotropic spatial resolution. These results demonstrate that Xe129 ventilation images can be obtained with quality and spatial resolution similar to that demonstrated by using He3.