Sliding window reduced FOV reconstruction for real-time cardiac imaging

Background: Current,nctional cardiovascular imaging protocols mostly rely on electrocardiogram (ECG) gating and breathholding. The resulting image quality can substantially suffer from insufficient patient cooperation or severe arrhythmia. Real-time imaging can mitigate these effects but requires highly accelerated techniques, usually relying on non-cartesian trajectories and Compressed Sensing (CS). Methods: We investigate a sliding window reduced field of view (RN) Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) technique for realtime cardiac MRI. Segmented EPI has been, combined with a subtraction technique for reducing the FOV in, cardiac applications to the region of the beating heart, Residual respiratory motion, potentially impairing the image quality, has been addressed by continuous update of the static image fraction, which is derived from a low-temporal resolution sliding window reconstruction.. For further acceleration, the proposed technique was combined with parallel imaging, Results: The sliding window reduced FOV technique was proven feasible to reconstruct images of diagnostic image quality at a temporal resolution of 36,5 ms per image, Semi-quantitative evaluation of image quality showed significant improvement over the existing rEOV method (p = 0.039). Derived functional parameters show comparable results as with the RH-C/NE reference. However, a trend to a slight underestimation of the largest and smallest in-plane volumes is observed, Conclusion: The proposed technique is feasible ofproviding real-time cardiac MRI with a temporal resolution better than. 40 ins without the need of computably complex reconstruction techniques.