Free-breathing 3D High-resolution Simultaneous Grey-blood Late Gadolinium Enhancement and MR Angiography at 3T

Motivation: CMR can provide multi-contrast images including late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) for myocardial tissue characterization and cardiac MR angiography (CMRA) for anatomical imaging. However, they are usually acquired separately in clinical routine. Goal(s): To propose a 3D simultaneous Grey-Blood and Bright-blOOd phase SensiTive inversion recovery (GB-BOOST) sequence for one-stop imaging. Approach: The proposed sequence acquires two interleaved 3D volumes with image navigator-based motion-correction in concert with inversion-recovery and T2-preparation pulses to obtain GB-LGE and CMRA simultaneously. Results: GB-BOOST sequence can achieve whole-heart GB-LGE and CMRA with 1.2mm3 resolution in a single fast scan of approximately 10 mins with comparable performance as separately acquired images. Impact: The proposed sequence can achieve co-registered 3D whole-heart grey-blood late gadolinium enhancement and cardiac MR angiography at a resolution of 1.2mm3 in a single fast scan of approximately 10 mins with comparable image quality as separately acquired images.