Improving Fat Suppression in Radial Coronary MRA using a Weighted Golden Ratio Acquisition

Claudia Prieto¹, Rene Botnar¹, Tobias Schaeffter¹

Scan time of coronary MRA can be reduced using radial sampling with long cardiac acquisition windows by exploiting its intrinsic motion insensitivity. However, with this approach, image quality may be hampered due to recovery of epicardial fat signal after a fat-saturation prepulse. Here we propose to use a k-space filtered golden radial acquisition to overcome this problem. Filtering is used to weight selectively the k-space data according to their fat saturation levels while the golden angle approach allows retrospective subject-specific filter adaptation for optimal fat suppression. Significantly improved fat-suppression is shown in a water-fat phantom and right coronary artery images in healthy subjects.