3D Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Using Undersampled Golden-Radial Phase Encoding

INTRODUCTION: 3D Time-Resolved Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) is an important tool to depict anatomic and dynamic information (bolus pass) of thoracic vessels. The current limitation of this application is the requirement of both high spatial and temporal resolution. Several methods have been proposed to overcome this problem [1-3], however, these techniques usually need an accurate timing of the bolus arrival and a fixed, predetermined trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution. As an alternative, we propose a new dynamic undersampled acquisition scheme, which combines a 3D radial phase encoding trajectory [4] with the golden angle profile order [5]. This approach allows retrospective adaptation of the spatial-temporal resolution trade-off according to the different stages of the bolus pass. For instance, images can be reconstructed with high temporal resolution for the first dynamic frames and high spatial resolution for the later ones, without the need of a previous bolus track acquisition. Moreover, the proposed method takes advantage of the flexibility and properties of the trajectory to provide an explicit good regularization for iterative reconstructions.