Hui Xue1, Xiaoming Bi2,
Christoph Guetter1, Sven Zuehlsdorff2, Marie-Pierre
Jolly1, Jens Guehring1, Peter Kellman3
1Imaging and Visualization,
Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ, United States; 2CMR
Research and Development, Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Chicago, IL,
United States; 3National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National
Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States
Recent development in cardiac MR shows that improved SNR can be achieved by selectively averaging the motion-corrected free-breathing images using the non-rigid image registration. In this work we presented dedicated retrospective techniques to improve the free-breathing, single-shot T2w imaging using motion correction and optimal image combination which computes a weighting function to minimize the total deformation brought into the averaging and effectively avoids visible artifacts possibly introduced by imperfect registration. The whole process was validated on patient datasets, showing the noticeable SNR gain can be achieved without introducing smearing artifacts.