Manojkumar Saranathan1, Ersin Bayram2, Vijay Nimbargi3, Ramesh Venkatesan3, James Glockner4
1Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Rochester, MN, USA; 2MR Engineering, GE Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, USA; 3GE Healthcare, Bangalore, India; 4Dept. of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA
MR Coronary Artery Imaging (CAI) remains challenging due to constraints imposed by physiological motion as well as stringent fat and background suppression requirements. 3D ECG gated steady state free precession (SSFP) imaging has shown great promise due to its high SNR, excellent blood-myocardium contrast and short scan times. Robust fat suppression is challenging at high field strengths due to B0 and B1 inhomogeneities. Further, fat saturation pulses perturb the steady state, causing severe artifacts. We report a novel ECG gated dual-echo 3D SSFP sequence with a two-point Dixon fat-water reconstruction algorithm and demonstrate its potential for imaging the coronary arteries at 3T.