Robust & Fully Integrated One Dimensional Respiratory Self-Navigation for Whole-Heart Coronary MRI

Davide Piccini¹, Arne Littmann², Sonia Nielles-Vallespin², Michael O. Zenge²

Conventional navigator-gated techniques for coronary MRI are burdened with low scan-time efficiency and sub-optimal precision. Self-navigating methods promise to overcome these limitations using the positional information of the heart directly accessible in the readouts used for imaging. These methods, however, suffer from the presence of signal form chest wall, arms and liver which can render the respiratory motion detection impossible. In the current work, an innovative method to efficiently suppress such unwanted signal is presented and robust self-navigation is achieved. This method was fully integrated into 3D radial whole-heart coronary imaging and was compared with conventional navigator-gated imaging in volunteers.