Improved Free-Breathing Volumetric Liver Fat and R2* Quantification Using 3D Stack-of-Radial GRE Dixon MRI and XD-GRASP Reconstruction

Respiratory motion compensation is necessary for free-breathing stack-of-radial liver fat and R2* quantification. While self-gating is a valid approach, it may lead to degraded quality of images and quantitative maps and possible prolonged acquisition. A 3D XD-GRASP stack-of-radial technique was developed and evaluated in a motion phantom and in vivo subjects. Results demonstrated PDFF and R2* agreement of the proposed method compared to reference methods. Improved image and map quality and PDFF and R2* quantification agreement of the proposed method using an acceleration factor of 4 (equivalent to 105 seconds of time saving) were observed compared to the self-gating method.