Realtime Free-Breathing Ungated Imaging of Cardiac Function and Viability Using an IR-Spiral-SSFP Sequence

Venkat Ramanan¹, Labonny Biswas¹, Jay Stephen Detsky¹, Rhonda Walcarius¹, Gideon A. Paul¹, Alexander J. Dick¹, Graham A. Wright¹

Free-breathing, Ungated Realtime imaging using inversion recovery cartesian SSFP has been proposed to assess myocardial function and viability. However since these techniques suffer from poor temporal resolution, we have designed Realtime IR-Spiral-SSFP to improve it. Several waveforms were designed and tested resulting in different spatial and temporal resolutions. We scanned a few patients with a spiral waveform of 88ms temporal resolution and 3mm spatial resolution. Preliminary results show that this is a viable imaging approach and there is scope for further improvement to improve the tradeoffs between spatial vs temporal resolution.