Free-breathing 3D Stack-of-Spiral Cardiac Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping for Noninvasive Measurement of Cardiac Chamber Oxygenation

A free-breathing 3D stack-of-spiral data acquisition was developed for motion-free cardiac quantitative susceptibility mapping, to tackle the challenge where even a short breath-hold is difficult for patients to perform. ECG and respiratory bellow signal were recorded for retrospective motion binning. A 5D dataset incorporating additional cardiac and respiratory phase dimensions were reconstructed with joint spatiotemporal regularization to generate a motion-free cardiac QSM. In healthy volunteers, this method was compared with a motion-averaged reconstruction and with a separate breath-hold spiral cardiac QSM using Cartesian navigator QSM as reference. Equivalent right-to-left heart chamber differential blood oxygenation was observed among all method studied.