Reducing femoral flow artefacts in radial MR Fingerprinting: A comparison of two methods applied to prostate imaging

High acceleration factors in radial magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) of the prostate lead to strong streaking artefacts from flow in the femoral blood vessels, distorting quantitative T1 and T2 measurements. We here compare two approaches to mitigate these artefacts, namely incorporating regional saturation bands in the MRF sequence (Sat-MRF) or applying region-optimized virtual coils to suppress signal from select spatial regions before image reconstruction (ROVir-MRF). Results from seven asymptomatic volunteers show that both methods efficiently reduce signal in the region of the femoral vessels, but there are differences in retained prostate signal to noise ratio and sensitivity to T1.