Incorporation of View-Sharing and KWIC Filtering into XD-GRASP Reconstruction Improves Spatial Resolution in Thoracic NC-MRA

Conventional thoracic non-contrast magnetic resonance angiography (NC-MRA) often produces suboptimal image quality in pediatric patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) and results in lengthy scan times. We recently developed a NC-MRA pulse sequence using a stack-of-stars k-space sampling pattern with XD-GRASP reconstruction and evaluated its performance in adults. In this study, we sought to improve our NC-MRA pulse sequence by incorporating view-sharing (VS) and k-space weighted image contrast (KWIC) filtering to reduce blurring, which is critical for pediatric patients who have smaller hearts and faster heart rates than adults. We evaluated it performance against contrast-enhanced MRA in pediatric patients.