Simon Konstandin1, Lothar R. Schad1
1Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany
Sodium heart imaging is mainly used for research on myocardial infarction and viability purposes. The necessity of ECG-triggering for low resolutions was never examined. In this work, the reasonability of ECG-triggering is investigated at low resolutions needed for sodium MRI. Signal errors due to motion artifacts are below 5 % in myocardium and, therefore, the benefit of ECG-triggering is questionable. However, studies on patients with myocardial infarction (i.e., increased signal in the myocardium) must be performed to show the reasonability of ECG-triggering. Retrospective ECG-gating with Golden angle increments is shown for a time-efficient acquisition and, therefore, to increase signal-to-noise ratio.