Whole-Heart Imaging Using Undersampled Radial Phase Encoding (RPE) and Iterative Sensitivity Encoding (SENSE) Reconstruction

Whole-heart isotropic nonangulated cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is becoming an important protocol in simplifying MRI, since it reduces the need of cumbersome planning of angulations. However the acquisition times of whole-heart MRI are prohibitive due to the large fields of view (FOVs) and the high spatial resolution required for depicting small structures and vessels. To address this problem, we propose a three-dimensional (3D) acquisition scheme that combines Cartesian sampling in the readout direction with an undersampled radial scheme in the phase-encoding plane. Different undersampling patterns were investigated in combination with an iterative sensitivity encoding (SENSE) reconstruction and a 32-channel cardiac coil. Noise amplification maps were calculated to compare the performance of the different patterns using iterative SENSE reconstruction. The radial phase-encoding (RPE) scheme was implemented on a clinical MR scanner and tested on phantoms and healthy volunteers. The proposed method exhibits better image quality even for high acceleration factors (up to 12) in comparison to Cartesian acquisitions. Magn Reson Med 62: 1331-1337, 2009. (C) 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.