Accelerated imaging of rest and stress myocardial perfusion MRI using multi-coil k-t SLR: a feasibility study

Background In myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), highly accelerated acquisition can be used towards reducing the compromises in the image quality (spatio-temporal resolutions, volume coverage, SNR) routinely observed with the current clinical protocols. In this study, we demonstrate the feasibility of a recent accelerated dynamic MRI scheme, k-t SLR (based on sparse and low rank properties) (Lingala et al. ‘11) in free breathing MPI. k-t SLR exploits natural redundancy in MPI by using (a) the high degree of temporal correlations, and (b) the sparse properties of the images in appropriate transform domains (finite difference transforms along space and time). It poses the recovery as a spectral regularization problem, allowing for the use of fast optimization solvers and flexible non-Cartesian sampling schemes. Here, we also include information from multiple coils to improve data consistency in the recovery. We demonstrate high accelerations with both rest and stress data sets. Comparisons are made with existing schemes such as spatio-temporal constrained reconstruction (STCR, Adluru et al ‘09) and k-t SPARSE/ SENSE (Otazo et al ‘10).