High-Resolution Free-Breathing Quantitative First-Pass Perfusion Cardiac MR Using Dual-Echo Dixon With Spatio-Temporal Acceleration

Introduction: To develop and test the feasibility of free-breathing (FB), high-resolution quantitative first-pass perfusion cardiac MR (FPP-CMR) using dual-echo Dixon (FOSTERS; Fat-water separation for mOtion-corrected Spatio-TEmporally accelerated myocardial peRfuSion). Materials and Methods: FOSTERS was performed in FB using a dual-saturation single-bolus acquisition with dual-echo Dixon and a dynamically variable Cartesian k-t undersampling (8-fold) approach, with low-rank and sparsity constrained reconstruction, to achieve high-resolution FPP-CMR images. FOSTERS also included automatic in-plane motion estimation and T (Formula presented.) correction to obtain quantitative myocardial blood flow (MBF) maps. High-resolution (1.6 x 1.6 mm²) FB FOSTERS was evaluated in eleven patients, during rest, against standard-resolution (2.6 x 2.6 mm²) 2-fold SENSE-accelerated breath-hold (BH) FPP-CMR. In addition, MBF was computed for FOSTERS and spatial wavelet-based compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction. Two cardiologists scored the image quality (IQ) of FOSTERS, CS, and standard BH FPP-CMR images using a 4-point scale (1–4, non-diagnostic – fully diagnostic). Results: FOSTERS produced high-quality images without dark-rim and with reduced motion-related artifacts, using an 8x accelerated FB acquisition. FOSTERS and standard BH FPP-CMR exhibited excellent IQ with an average score of 3.5 ± 0.6 and 3.4 ± 0.6 (no statistical difference, p > 0.05), respectively. CS images exhibited severe artifacts and high levels of noise, resulting in an average IQ score of 2.9 ± 0.5. MBF values obtained with FOSTERS presented a lower variance than those obtained with CS. Discussion: FOSTERS enabled high-resolution FB FPP-CMR with MBF quantification. Combining motion correction with a low-rank and sparsity-constrained reconstruction results in excellent image quality.