Whole-heart coronary MRA with 3D affine motion correction using 3D image-based navigation.

Purpose: Robust motion correction is necessary to minimize respiratory motion artefacts in coronary MR angiography (CMRA). The state-of-the-art method uses a 1D feet-head translational motion correction approach, and data acquisition is limited to a small window in the respiratory cycle, which prolongs the scan by a factor of 2-3. The purpose of this work was to implement 3D affine motion correction for Cartesian whole-heart CMRA using a 3D navigator (3D-NAV) to allow for data acquisition throughout the whole respiratory cycle.

Methods: 3D affine transformations for different respiratory states (bins) were estimated by using 3D-NAV image acquisitions which were acquired during the startup profiles of a steady-state free precession sequence. The calculated 3D affine transformations were applied to the corresponding high-resolution Cartesian image acquisition which had been similarly binned, to correct for respiratory motion between bins.

Results: Quantitative and qualitative comparisons showed no statistical difference between images acquired with the proposed method and the reference method using a diaphragmatic navigator with a narrow gating window.

Conclusion: We demonstrate that 3D-NAV and 3D affine correction can be used to acquire Cartesian whole-heart 3D coronary artery images with 100% scan efficiency with similar image quality as with the state-of-the-art gated and corrected method with approximately 50% scan efficiency.