Feasibility and evaluation of free-breathing and self-gated cartesian-sampled T1-weighted 4D MRI with compressed sensing resulting in combined diagnostic image quality and perfusion analysis

In clinical practice, a remaining challenge of dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE)-MRI is to acquire a high spatio-temporal resolution without motion artifacts and diagnostic quality, despite acquisitions over several minutes. In particular, iterative reconstruction techniques have brought free-breathing acquisitions in clinical range. In this study, we proved feasibility and evaluated a prototype Cartesian-sampled fat-saturated T1-weighted 3D gradient-echo sequence with automated respiratory self-gating and compressed sensing reconstruction (VIBE_SG-CS) for continuous dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI and perfusion analysis including lesion detection of the liver using a Tofts model. VIBE_SG-CS including perfusion analyisis showed better motion robustness and similar lesion conspicuity compared to a standard morphology sequence (fat-saturated T2-TSE).