Improving Fat Suppression in Radial Coronary Mra Using a Weighted Golden Ratio Acquisition

INTRODUCTION: Coronary MR angiography benefits from the favorable motion properties of radial k-space sampling [1-2], which allow reducing scan time by use of longer cardiac acquisition windows [3]. However, recovery of epicardial fat signal during the prolonged data acquisition window may impair image quality as radial trajectories repeatedly sample the center of k-space. Moreover, the effectiveness of the fat suppression may depend on the subject specific epicardial fat distribution. Here we investigate the use of a k-space filtered golden radial acquisition [4] to overcome this problem. The filtering is used to consider the k-space central data only for those radial projections with sufficient fat suppression. The golden angle approach has been chosen as it allows retrospective subject specific filter adaptation for optimal fat suppression.