Whole-Heart Water/Fat Resolved Spiral Imaging for Coronary MRA and Fatty Myocardial Infiltrations

Peter Brnert¹, Kay Nehrke¹, Holger Eggers¹, Peter Koken¹

Fat suppression is essential to improve contrast in MR coronary angiography (CMRA) but fat also contains helpful diagnostic information. In particular, the intra-myocardial fat represents an important diagnostic indicator that could have high prognostic value. Therefore, in this work whole heart CMRA-type imaging is proposed that delivers both, the coronary tree and the fat signal distribution at the same spatial resolution. Dixon-based chemical shift encoded spiral imaging is used allowing to separate water and fat and to benefits from the Bo -based off-resonance correction. This concept was applied and validated in volunteers and shows that efficient CMRA and intra-myocardial fat detection is possible with large volume coverage.