Accelerated three-dimensional free-breathing first pass cardiac perfusion at 1.5T

Background Perfusion CMR provides an important diagnostic tool for the detection of myocardial ischemia in patients with known or suspected CAD [1]. Conventionally, 2D multislice imaging with 2-4 short-axis slices is often used for evaluation of left ventricular perfusion. 3D CMR perfusion has been proposed for its superior coverage and higher SNR [2]. However, accelerated imaging is required for adequate spatio-temporal resolution. Recent studies in accelerated CMR have shown that utilizing local information in the imaging volume significantly improves reconstruction quality [3,4]. However, such highly accelerated k-t based techniques used for 3D perfusion [3] require breath-hold acquisitions, which may be difficult following physical stress or for some patients. In this study, we sought to develop a compressed-sensing (CS) based image reconstruction technique utilizing local imaging features for highly-accelerated 3D free-breathing perfusion CMR.