High efficiency coronary MRA with non-rigid cardiac motion correction: beyond the quiescent period

Background Coronary arteries remain challenging structures to image using MRI due to the small size, tortuous course, and continual motion. Current high-resolution whole-heart techniques use prospective ECG-triggering and navigator gating to suppress cardiac and respiratory motion artifacts, respectively. However, these motion suppression strategies only accept data acquired within a narrow window in the cardiac and respiratory cycles, resulting in low scanning efficiency and prolonged scan time. Recent works use respiratory motion correction to achieve 100% respiratory gating efficiency [1-3]. In this work, we extend this concept and develop a non-rigid cardiac motion correction method to extend the cardiac acceptance window beyond the quiescent period.