3D self-gated cardiac cine imaging at 3 Tesla using stack-of-stars bSSFP with tiny golden angles and compressed sensing

Purpose: To develop and evaluate an accelerated 3D self-gated cardiac tine imaging technique at 3 Tesla without the use of external electrocardiogram triggering or respiratory gating. Methods: A 3D stack-of-stars balanced steady-state free precession sequence with a tiny golden angle sampling scheme was developed to reduced eddy current effect-related artefacts at 3 Tesla. Respiratory and cardiac motion were derived from a central 5-point self-gating signal extraction approach. The data acquired around the end-expiration phases were then sorted into individual cardiac bins and used for reconstruction with compressed sensing. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, image quality (1: the best; 4: the worst) was quantitatively compared using both the proposed method and the conventional 3D golden-angle self-gated method. Linear regression and Bland-Altman analysis were used to assess the functional measurements agreement between the proposed method and the routine 2D breath-hold multi-slice technique. Results: Compared to the conventional 3D golden-angle self-gated method, the proposed method yielded images with much less streaking artifact and higher myocardium edge sharpness (0.50 +/- 0.06 vs. 0.45 +/- 0.05, P = 0.004). The proposed method provided an inferior image quality score to the routine 2D technique (2.13 +/- 0.35 vs. 1.38 +/- 0.52, P = 0.063) but a superior one to the conventional self-gated method (2.13 +/- 0.35 vs. 3.13 +/- 0.64, P = 0.031). Left ventricular functional measurements between the proposed method and routine 2D technique were all well in agreement. Conclusion: This study presents a novel self-gating approach to realize rapid 3D cardiac tine imaging at 3 Tesla.