Accelerated 3D Stack-of-Spiral Cardiac Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping: Noninvasive Measurement of Heart Oxygenation in a Breath-Hold

A breath-holding non-cardiac gated 3D stack-of-spiral data acquisition scheme was developed to continuously sample the data for cardiac quantitative susceptibility mapping. Compared to the previously proposed navigator-based prospective Cartesian acquisition, the accelerated spiral sequence can be done within 20 seconds breath-holds, leading to over a 20-fold reduction in scan time. The spiral QSM as well as the navigator QSM were performed on cohorts of healthy volunteers and COVID-19 survivors, showing well aligned quantification results on the differential blood oxygenation between the right and left heart.