Accelerating 3D Molecular MR Imaging Using Compressed Sensing

Claudia Prieto¹, Marcelo Andia¹, Tobias Schaeffter¹, Rene M. Botnar¹

Accelerated Molecular MR-imaging using Compressed Sensing (CS) is demonstrated for preclinical applications. The sparsity requirement of CS is satisfied in most molecular MR-images, due to the high localized T1-contrast enhancement produced by target-specific contrast agents. Good overall image quality was achieved with acceleration factors up to 4 in 3D preclinical studies of venous thromboembolism and aortic vessel wall. CS is especially useful for small animal studies (requiring high spatial resolution and thus suffering from prolonged scan times), whereas other acceleration techniques such as parallel imaging often cannot be applied due to the limited availability of multi channel small animal coils.