Improved Efficiency for Respiratory Motion Compensation in 3D Flow Measurements

Mehmet Akakaya¹, Praveen Gulaka², Tamer A. Basha¹, Warren J. Manning¹, Reza Nezafat¹

Phase contrast (PC) cardiac MR (CMR) is widely used to assess blood flow in cardiovascular disease. Clinically, 2D acquisitions are used for measurements of blood flow. Recently 3D PC CMR has been proposed to characterize all three directional components of blood flow. However, these require long, navigator-gated free-breathing scans, which limits its clinical usage, where accuracy and reproducibility of the flow measurements is important. In this study, we hypothesized that respiratory-gating the central k-space only will yield similar measurements to a fully respiratory-gated acquisition, and evaluated these two gating approaches in terms of quantification of cardiac indices and imaging efficiency.