Why the study?
Balanced SSFP left atrial cine suffers from off-resonance artifacts, and standard multiple-acquisition SSFP effectively removes banding but substantially increases scan time.
Does undersampled radial MA-SSFP with interleaving improve image quality of left atrial cine imaging compared to fully sampled radial bSSFP in healthy subjects?
Does undersampled radial MA-SSFP with interleaving improve image quality of left atrial cine imaging compared to fully sampled radial bSSFP in healthy subjects?
Interleaved radial MA-SSFP cine reduces banding artifacts and improves left atrial and pulmonary vein visualization compared to standard bSSFP, despite a small increase in scan time and streak artifacts.
PURPOSE: Balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) left atrial (LA) cine suffers from off-resonance artifacts, particularly in the pulmonary veins (PVs). Linear combination or multiple-acquisition SSFP (MA-SSFP) effectively removes banding but greatly increases scan time. We hypothesized that MA-SSFP with interleaved radial undersampling, where each phase-cycling is acquired with an interleaved set of radial projections, would improve image quality of LA cine with a small increase of scan time and streak artefacts. METHODS: Undersampled radial MA-SSFP with and without interleaving was compared with fully sampled radial bSSFP by means of simulations, phantoms, and in vivo imaging. Ten healthy subjects were imaged on a 3T scanner, with bSSFP and MA-SSFP cine of the left atrium, and B0-mapping. Images were assessed (1 = worst, 5 = best) by 2 independent readers, with respect to 5 qualitative criteria and apparent signal-to-noise ratio. RESULTS: In healthy subjects, off-resonance differed from the right inferior PVs to the LA cavity by 163 Hz ± 73 Hz at 3T. Compared with fully sampled radial bSSFP, interleaved radial MA-SSFP significantly improved image quality with respect to off-resonance artifacts (3.8 ± 0.6 versus 2.3 ± 1.0; P = 0.005), PV conspicuity (2.8 ± 1.0 versus 4.3 ± 0.5; P = 0.005), and the number of visualized PVs (1.7 ± 0.4 versus 0.9 ± 0.7; P = 0.008), although with greater streak artifacts (3.4 ± 0.4 versus 4.9 ± 0.2; P = 0.004) and lower measured apparent signal-to-noise ratio (24 ± 9 versus 69 ± 36; P = 0.002). Flow artifacts were similar. Interleaved radial MA-SSFP reduced streaking artifacts and increased apparent signal-to-noise ratio versus noninterleaved radial. CONCLUSIONS: Interleaved radial MA-SSFP cine reduces banding artifacts with an acceptable increase of scan time and streak artifacts. The proposed technique improves the LA and PV visualization in bSSFP cine imaging.
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Robb et al. (2019) studied this question.
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