Lan Ge1, Aya Kino1, Mark Griswold2,
James Carr1, Debiao Li1
1Departments of Radiology and
Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States; 2Departments
of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, OH,
United States
Time-resolved
data acquisition with Sliding-Window Conjugate-Gradient HighlY constrained
back PRojection (1, 2) (SW-CG-HYPR) has been used to acquire myocardial
perfusion images with increased spatial coverage, better spatial resolution,
and improved SNR (3). However, this method is sensitive to respiratory
motion; therefore, breath-hold is required during data acquisition. In this
work, we developed a motion correction method for SW-CG-HYPR, allowing
free-breathing myocardial perfusion MRI. The average image quality score of
the free-breathing images with motion correction (3.090.37) is significantly
higher than that without motion correction (2.260.40), and is comparable to
the successful breath-holding images (3.100.41). The signal changes in motion corrected free-breathing images were
closely correlated to the breath-holding images, with a correlation
coefficient of 0.9764 for myocardial signals.