Coronary artery imaging at 3T using a novel ECG gated SSFP-Dixon sequence and a motion insensitive view ordering scheme

Purpose: MR Coronary Artery Imaging (CAI) remains challenging due to the need for high spatial resolution as well as due to constraints imposed by physiological motion and the stringent requirements for fat and muscle suppression to visualize the arterial signal with good contrast. 3D ECG gated balanced steady state free precession (SSFP) imaging has shown great promise due to its high SNR, excellent blood-myocardium contrast and short scan times. Robust fat suppression remains challenging at high field strengths due to B0 and B1 inhomogeneities. Furthermore, fat saturation pulses perturb the SSFP steady state and can result in severe artifacts. We report a novel ECG gated dual-echo 3D balanced SSFP sequence with a two-point Dixon fat-water reconstruction algorithm and demonstrate its potential for imaging the coronary arteries at 3T.