High resolution multislice imaging of the fetal heart using iGRASP and MOG

Background Multi-slice CINE MRI is an integral facet of postnatal cardiac examinations, but its application to the fetal heart is hampered by the lack of a fetal cardiac gating signal and the possibility of fetal motion. In this work, a method for reconstructing high spatial and temporal resolution multi-slice images of the fetal heart in a clinically acceptable scan time is presented. The proposed method combines metric optimized gating (MOG), a solution for fetal cardiac gating, with golden-angle radial sparse parallel MRI (iGRASP), a motion-robust acquisition and reconstruction scheme for highly undersampled data acquisitions [1,2].