A fully automated binning method for improved SHARP reconstruction of free-breathing cardiac images

Background Despite recent progress in fast cardiac imaging, respiratory motion remains a challenging problem, usually leading to poor image quality when scanning poor breath-holder patients or acquiring high spatial resolution images. Today respiratory motion is compensated using navigators or external physiological sensors and can result in decreased scan efficiency and increased setup complexity. We recently proposed a motion compensated reconstruction, Single-sHot Accelerated Reconstruction with Preserved-features, or SHARP, that enables high-resolution motion-corrected reconstruction of multiple single-shot images acquired in free-breathing, with respiratory motion derived directly from the single-shot images. In the present work, a fast and automatic self-navigated binning method is described, which aims to accelerate the SHARP reconstruction process while improving image quality. The rationale for accelerating SHARP is that raw data acquired in similar motion states can be clustered into a reduced number of motion states, thereby, improving the quality of images from which to extract motion.