Davide Piccini1,
2, Gabriele Bonanno2, Giulia Ginami2, 3,
Arne Littmann4, Michael O. Zenge4, Matthias Stuber2
1Advanced
Clinical Imaging Technology, Siemens Healthcare IM S AW, Lausanne,
Switzerland; 2Department of Radiology, University Hospital (CHUV)
and University of Lausanne (UNIL) / Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM),
Lausanne, Switzerland; 3Department of Information Engineering,
University of Padova, Padova, Italy; 4MR Application and Workflow
Development, Healthcare Sector, Siemens AG, Erlangen, Bayern, Germany
In standard respiratory self-navigated (SN) whole heart coronary MRA, the reference position for motion correction is usually selected at the very beginning of the image data acquisition. In this work, the relationship between the choice of the reference and objective image quality was investigated. End-expiration, end-inspiration and mean respiratory position were considered as possible candidate reference respiratory positions for SN whole-heart coronary MRI and tested in 11 volunteers. Vessel sharpness of the mid segment of the left anterior descending coronary artery was computed for every dataset. End-expiration was found to significantly improve vessel sharpness, when compared to the end-inspiration.