Automatic in-plane rotation for doubly-oblique cardiac imaging.

PURPOSE To develop and test a method for automatically calculating the in-plane rotation for doubly-oblique slice geometry in order to minimize wrap artifacts for a given FOV. MATERIALS AND METHODS The equations for in-plane rotation were formulated for doubly-oblique imaging of a cylindrical body with elliptical cross-section. Based on this formulation, automatic in-plane rotation was implemented and tested on a commercial scanner using nominal values for ellipticity of the body. RESULTS Short axis, doubly oblique, cardiac imaging were acquired with and without in-plane rotation. The desired in-plane rotation proved to be relatively insensitive to the ellipticity of the body, permitting an automatic solution based on a nominal value. CONCLUSION In-plane rotation is desirable for doubly oblique imaging (e.g., cardiac applications), particularly for reduced-FOV accelerated imaging such as SENSE. The proposed method, which provides an approximate solution for automatic, in-plane rotation for doubly-oblique imaging, was demonstrated.