Golden-angle Sparse Liver Imaging: Radial or Cartesian Sampling?

This work compares golden-angle stack-of-stars sampling and golden-angle Cartesian sampling for free-breathing liver MRI with eXtra-Dimensional (XD) compressed sensing reconstruction. For Cartesian sampling, the phase-encoding steps in the k_y-k_z plane are segmented into multiple interleaves that rotate at a golden angle. Each interleave starts from the center (k_y=k_z=0) of k-space and follows a pseudo-radial pattern on a Cartesian grid. Results from this initial study suggest that golden-angle Cartesian sampling achieves higher effective spatial resolution than radial sampling, but it still suffers from residual ghosting artifacts due to respiratory motion for free-breathing liver imaging.