A dual‐projection respiratory self‐gating technique for whole‐heart coronary MRA

PURPOSE: To investigate the accuracy of a dual-projection respiratory self-gating (DP-RSG) technique in dynamic heart position measurement and its feasibility for free-breathing whole-heart coronary MR angiography (MRA). MATERIALS AND METHODS: A DP-RSG method is proposed to enable accurate direct measurement of heart position by acquiring two whole-heart projections. On 14 volunteers we quantitatively evaluated the efficacy of DP-RSG by comparison with diaphragmatic navigator (NAV) and single-projection-based respiratory self-gating (SP-RSG) methods. For DP-RSG we also compared center-of-mass and two profile-matching algorithms in deriving heart motion. Coronary imaging was conducted on eight volunteers based on retrospective gating to preliminarily validate the effectiveness of DP-RSG for whole-heart coronary MRA. Comparison of vessel delineation was performed between images reconstructed using different gating methods. RESULTS: The quantitative evaluation shows that DP-RSG more accurately tracks heart motion than NAV with all gating window (GW) values and SP-RSG approaches with GW>or=2.5 mm and profile-matching algorithms are more reliable for motion derivation than center-of-mass calculations with GW>or=1.0 mm. Whole-heart coronary MRA studies demonstrate the feasibility of using DP-RSG to improve overall delineation of the coronary arteries. CONCLUSION: DP-RSG is a promising approach to better resolve respiratory motion for whole-heart coronary MRA compared to conventional NAV and SP-RSG.