Christoph Kolbitsch1, Daniel Giese1, Jouke Smink2, Claudia Prieto1, Tobias Schaeffter1
1Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, King's College London, London, United Kingdom; 2Philips Healthcare, Best, Netherlands
Retrospectively cardiac-gated cine imaging is commonly used to analyse cardiac function. Self-navigation techniques exploiting signal amplitude changes due to blood flow in the acquired data avoid external ECGs. Nevertheless, they require detectable signals correlated to blood flow in each slice and synchronisation between different slices cannot be guaranteed. Here we propose to overcome this limitation by obtaining a navigator from 2D real-time images using a simultaneously excited second navigator slice. This yielded a cardiac gating signal used to resort data for cine imaging with an accuracy of 16ms compared to an external ECG and a variation of 8ms between slices.