Free-breathing dynamic magnetic resonance imaging of the abdomen

Abdominal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is complicated by tissue motion as well as by weak tissue contrast. The major source of motion is respiration, which can be dealt with by breath-hold imaging or by respiratory triggering. Nevertheless, these commonly used methods are known to have their limitations in terms of patient burden as well as in image quality. We propose a method that allows 3-dimensional (3D) motion-compensated imaging of the bowel in the presence of continued respiratory motion and normal bowel peristalsis. The method is based on a computationally efficient spatiotemporal recursive search cube matching algorithm which allows accurate real-time volumetric motion estimation and compensation for the respiratory motion. We are currently evaluating the application to motioncompensated reconstruction of dynamic contrast-enhanced data of the colon.