Utility of Stack-of-stars Acquisition for Arterial Phase Imaging without Breath-holding on Dynamic MRI of the Liver

We compared arterial phase (AP) images using conventional (Cartesian) breath-hold liver acquisition with volume acceleration (LAVA) and stack-of-stars acquisition without breath-holding (LAVA-Star) on hepatic dynamic MRI. In Cartesian breath-hold LAVA group, 8.7% of patients showed inadequate scan timing of AP, while only 1 patient (4.0%) in LAVA-Star group (12 s/phase) showed inadequate scan timing. One advantage of LAVA-Star was that the adequate scan timing of AP can be obtained by using additional high frame rate reconstruction (3 s/phase) in the patient with inadequate scan timing in routine reconstruction. LAVA-Star was useful to obtain adequate scan timing in all patients.