Comparison of respiratory motion suppression techniques for 4D flow MRI

PURPOSE: The purpose of this work was to assess the impact of respiratory motion and to compare methods for suppression of respiratory motion artifacts in 4D Flow MRI. METHODS: A numerical 3D aorta phantom was designed based on an aorta velocity field obtained by computational fluid mechanics. Motion-distorted 4D Flow MRI measurements were simulated and several different motion-suppression techniques were evaluated: Gating with fixed acceptance window size, gating with different window sizes in inner and outer k-space, and k-space reordering. Additionally, different spatial resolutions were simulated. RESULTS: Respiratory motion reduced the image quality. All motion-suppression techniques improved the data quality. Flow rate errors of up to 30% without gating could be reduced to less than 2.5% with the most successful motion suppression methods. Weighted gating and gating combined with k-space reordering were advantageous compared with conventional fixed-window gating. Spatial resolutions finer than the amount of accepted motion did not lead to improved results. CONCLUSION: Respiratory motion affects 4D Flow MRI data. Several different motion suppression techniques exist that are capable of reducing the errors associated with respiratory motion. Spatial resolutions finer than the degree of accepted respiratory motion do not result in improved data quality. Magn Reson Med 78:1877-1882, 2017. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.