Comparison of Quantitative Pulmonary Ventilation Imaging using 3D-UTE under breath-holding and free-breathing in patients with structural lung disease at 3 T.

UTE-MRI allows morphologic examination of lung parenchyma and acquisition of different breathing states enables determination of quantitative pulmonary ventilation (QV). In 4 patients with lung disease imaging with a prototypical UTE Spiral VIBE sequence during breath-holding was compared with a free-breathing 3D-UTE koosh-ball technique. Different breathing states were acquired, and QV values and the air volume fraction (AVF) were calculated. Both techniques yielded clinically sufficient image quality and comparable results for QV and AVF values. While the breath-hold approach acquires the data in a fraction of time but is dependent on patient compliance, the self-gated free-breathing technique overcomes that problem with the drawback of a longer acquisition time.