Utility of Cardiac Gating for Pulmonary Perfusion MRI

Kang Wang¹, Mark Schiebler², Christopher Francois², Alejandro Munoz Del Rio^1,2, Frank Korosec¹, Sean Fain¹, Scott Nagle²

Cardiac motion is a common source of artifact on MR images of the thorax. Traditionally, ECG-gating has been employed to minimize these artifacts, at the expense of decreased scan efficiency and increased complexity in patient set-up. This trade-off is application-specific, with some imaging techniques more sensitive to cardiac motion artifacts than others. The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not ECG-gating improves image quality for pulmonary perfusion MRI using a recently developed pulmonary perfusion method that results in high isotropic spatial resolution, high temporal resolution, and whole chest coverage.