Introduction: The aim of this study was to estimate myocardial motion directly from a conventional SSFP (steady-state free precession) cine-MRI sequence. This sequence provides precise morphological information coupled with an adequate temporal resolution and excellent contrast between structures. We propose to use information naturally present in SSFP Cine-MRI for myocardial motion estimation....

Segmented cine MRI generally requires breath-holding, which can be problematic for many patients. Navigator echo techniques, particularly successful for free-breathing coronary MRA, are incompatible with the acquisition strategies and SSFP pulse sequences commonly used for cine MRI. The purpose of this work is to introduce a new self-gating technique deriving respiratory gating information dire...

Introduction Breath-hold cine MRI with balanced steady-steady free precession (b-SSFP) may yield non diagnostic image quality in patients with impaired breath-hold capacity and/or arrhythmias. In such patients, it may be necessary to perform real-time cine MRI. Currently, dynamic parallel imaging methods, such as TSENSE [1] and TGRAPPA [2], can be used to achieve only moderate acceleration rate...

Background Cardiac MR (CMR) has emerged as the gold standard in assessing biventricular size and systolic function with segmented balanced steady-state free-precession (bSSFP) cine acquisitions. The application of a novel prototype iterative reconstruction technique to sparsely undersampled segmented bSSFP cine acquisitions may enable higher acceleration factors while shortening image acquisiti...

Background The cine steady-state free-precession (SSFP) is the standard sequence for left ventricular (LV) function evaluation. However, SSFP mandates uninterrupted RF excitations to maintain steady-state (SS) during suspended respiration. In patients who cannot perform breath-holds (BH), a respiratory triggered (RT) free breathing (FB) retrospectively cardiac gated cine SSFP sequence that driv...

A compressed sensing dynamic MR technique called k-t FOCUSS (k-t FOCal Underdetermined System Solver) has been recently proposed. It outperforms the conventional k-t BLAST/SENSE (Broad-use Linear Acquisition Speed-up Technique/SENSitivity Encoding) technique by exploiting the sparsity of x-f signals. This paper applies this idea to radial trajectories for high-resolution cardiac cine imaging. R...

We address the task of aortic diameter measurement in (noncontrast-enhanced) plain axial cardiac cine MRI. To this end, we set up a likelihood maximization problem which allows us to recover globally optimal aorta locations and diameters of the cine sequence efficiently. Our approach provides intuitive means of manual post-correction and requires little user interaction, making large-scale imag...

Background For quantitative volumetric assessments of cardiac function, 3D cine images depicting motion of the entire ventricle in a complete cardiac cycle are needed. However, due to limited acceleration capability, breathheld 3D cine MRI is not obtainable using conventional parallel imaging. Several kt-acceleration methods have demonstrated high-acceleration capability for dynamic MRI by expl...

Background A typical CMR exam includes cine, tagging, and delayed-hyperenhancement (DHE) sequences to produce images for evaluating global heart function, myocardial contractility, and viability, respectively. Usually, DHE imaging is conducted at mid-diastole. Nevertheless, obtaining cine DHE images is appealing to obtain simultaneous information about tissue viability and wall motion abnormali...

This prospective study of eight healthy volunteers evaluates peak flow velocities (PFV) in the ascending aorta using real-time phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in comparison to cine phase-contrast MRI and echocardiography. Flow measurements by echocardiography and cine phase-contrast MRI with breath-holding were performed according to clinical standards. Real-time phase-contrast ...