GPU Accelerated Iterative SENSE Reconstruction of Radial Phase Encoded Whole-Heart MRI

Thomas Sangild Srensen¹, Claudia Prieto², David Atkinson³, Michael Schacht Hansen⁴, Tobias Schaeffter²

Isotropic whole-heart imaging has become an important protocol in simplifying cardiac MRI. The acquisition time can however be a prohibiting factor. To reduce acquisition times a 3D scheme combining Cartesian sampling in the readout direction with radial sampling in the phase encoding plane was recently suggested. It allows high undersampling factors in the phase encoding plane when obtaining data with a 32-channel coil array and employing non-Cartesian iterative SENSE for reconstruction. Unfortunately this reconstruction is a time consuming process. We demonstrate however that the reconstruction time can be brought to a clinically acceptable level using commodity graphics hardware (GPUs).