Yoon-Chul Kim1, R. Marc Lebel1, Michael C.K. Khoo2, Krishna S. Nayak1
1Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 2Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Imaging of upper airway dynamics can give new insights into the mechanisms of airway obstruction and provide data for its modeling. Conventional MRI is not fast enough to capture the entire airway volume and its dynamics. We demonstrate dynamic 3D imaging of the airway during inspiratory loading using 3D Cartesian imaging with golden-angle temporal view order and L1-SPIRiT reconstruction, to achieve 1.6 mm isotropic spatial and sub-second temporal resolution. The end result is a first-ever visualization of airway collapse using real-time 3D MRI.