Eight-fold K-t Blast Accelerated Dce-mri for High Resolution Assessment of Myocardial Perfusion

Introduction: Assessment of myocardial perfusion by dynamic contrast enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) is still an evolving technique and is yet to become a part of standard diagnostic assessment of patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). Despite its advantages over other tomographic methods, the transition of DCE-MRI from a promising research technique into a robust clinical tool has been impeded by the severe spatial and temporal constraints imposed by the nature of this examination. k-t BLAST is an acceleration method which differs from other acceleration approaches in that it allows reconstruction from undersampled data based on low resolution training data taking into account similarities in space and among time frames [1]. By exploiting the spatio-temporal correlations in the image series, this technique aims at full recovery of the missing information. We hypothesised that significant improvement in spatial resolution can be achieved through k-t BLAST acceleration of DCE-MRI without loss of image quality or diagnostic information.