Phased array ghost elimination (PAGE) for segmented SSFP imaging with interrupted steady-state

Lipid elimination with an echo-shifting N/2-ghost acquisition (LEENA) MRI

PURPOSE

The Dixon techniques provide uniform water-fat separation but require multiple image sets, which extend the overall acquisition time. Here, an alternative rapid single acquisition method, lipid elimination with an echo-shifting N/2-ghost acquisition (LEENA), was introduced.

METHODS

The LEENA method utilized a fast imaging with steady-state free precession sequence to obtain a single k-space dataset in which successive k-space lines are acquired to allow the fat magnetization to precess 180°. The LEENA data were then unghosted using either image-domain (LEENA-S) or k-space domain (LEENA-G) parallel imaging techniques to reconstruct water-only and fat-only images. An off-resonance correction technique was incorporated to improve the uniformity of the water-fat separation.

RESULTS

Uniform water-fat separation was achieved for both the LEENA-S and LEENA-G methods for phantom and human body and leg imaging applications at 1.5T and 3T. The resultant water and fat images were qualitatively similar to conventional 2-point Dixon and fat-suppressed images.

CONCLUSION

The LEENA-S and LEENA-G methods provide uniform water and fat images from a single MRI acquisition. These straightforward methods can be adapted to 1.5T and 3T clinical MRI scanners and provide comparable fat/water separation with conventional 2-point Dixon and fat-suppression techniques.

Artifact-reduced two-dimensional cine steady state free precession for myocardial blood- oxygen-level-dependent imaging

PURPOSE

To minimize image artifacts in long TR cardiac phase-resolved steady state free precession (SSFP) based blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) imaging.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Nine healthy dogs (four male, five female, 20-25 kg) were studied in a clinical 1.5 Tesla MRI scanner to investigate the effect of temporal resolution, readout bandwidth, and motion compensation on long repetition time (TR) SSFP images. Breath-held 2D SSFP cine sequences with various temporal resolutions (10-204 ms), bandwidths (239-930 Hz/pixel), with and without first-order motion compensation were prescribed in the basal, mid-ventricular, and apical along the short axis. Preliminary myocardial BOLD studies in dogs with controllable coronary stenosis were performed to assess the benefits of artifact-reduction strategies.

RESULTS

Shortening the readout time by means of increasing readout bandwidth had no observable reduction in image artifacts. However, increasing the temporal resolution in the presence of first-order motion compensation led to significant reduction in image artifacts. Preliminary studies demonstrated that BOLD signal changes can be reliably detected throughout the cardiac cycle.

CONCLUSION

Artifact-reduction methods used in this study provide significant improvement in image quality compared with conventional long TR SSFP BOLD MRI. It is envisioned that the methods proposed here may enable reliable detection of myocardial oxygenation changes throughout the cardiac cycle with long TR SSFP-based myocardial BOLD MRI.

Parallel magnetic resonance imaging

Parallel imaging has been the single biggest innovation in magnetic resonance imaging in the last decade. The use of multiple receiver coils to augment the time consuming Fourier encoding has reduced acquisition times significantly. This increase in speed comes at a time when other approaches to acquisition time reduction were reaching engineering and human limits. A brief summary of spatial encoding in MRI is followed by an introduction to the problem parallel imaging is designed to solve. There are a large number of parallel reconstruction algorithms; this article reviews a cross-section, SENSE, SMASH, g-SMASH and GRAPPA, selected to demonstrate the different approaches. Theoretical (the g-factor) and practical (coil design) limits to acquisition speed are reviewed. The practical implementation of parallel imaging is also discussed, in particular coil calibration. How to recognize potential failure modes and their associated artefacts are shown. Well-established applications including angiography, cardiac imaging and applications using echo planar imaging are reviewed and we discuss what makes a good application for parallel imaging. Finally, active research areas where parallel imaging is being used to improve data quality by repairing artefacted images are also reviewed.

Nonlinear averaging reconstruction method for phase-cycle SSFP

The ability to obtain high-quality images of small structures, such as the nerves of the inner ear, is important for the early diagnosis of numerous conditions. Balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP; e.g., true fast imaging with steady-state precession) is a fast acquisition method, but its use has been limited by the presence of off-resonance banding artifacts. To reduce these artifacts multiacquisition balanced SSFP with phase cycling is used, yielding multiple data sets in which the banding artifacts are spatially shifted with respect to each other (e.g., as in CISS). We present a new method, called nonlinear averaging (NLA), for combining these data sets to reduce banding artifacts. The NLA method arithmetically averages the three highest magnitude signals from four-phase-cycle SSFP data on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Simulations indicate that NLA offers improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over the more standard maximum intensity projection (MIP) reconstruction. NLA is compared to MIP in simulations and volunteer tests. Simulations suggest that NLA provides substantially improved SNR compared to MIP. In a randomized blinded comparison of 10 volunteer studies, two radiologists found that NLA, compared to MIP, gave improved results. NLA also provided superior noise reduction and enhanced edge sharpness compared to MIP. We demonstrate that NLA, similar to MIP, improves SNR and image quality. It does so consistently in all situations to which it is applied.

Phased array ghost elimination

Parallel imaging may be applied to cancel ghosts caused by a variety of distortion mechanisms, including distortions such as off-resonance or local flow, which are space variant. Phased array combining coefficients may be calculated that null ghost artifacts at known locations based on a constrained optimization, which optimizes SNR subject to the nulling constraint. The resultant phased array ghost elimination (PAGE) technique is similar to the method known as sensitivity encoding (SENSE) used for accelerated imaging; however, in this formulation is applied to full field-of-view (FOV) images. The phased array method for ghost elimination may result in greater flexibility in designing acquisition strategies. For example, in multi-shot EPI applications ghosts are typically mitigated by the use of an interleaved phase encode acquisition order. An alternative strategy is to use a sequential, non-interleaved phase encode order and cancel the resultant ghosts using PAGE parallel imaging. Cancellation of ghosts by means of phased array processing makes sequential, non-interleaved phase encode acquisition order practical, and permits a reduction in repetition time, TR, by eliminating the need for echo-shifting. Sequential, non-interleaved phase encode order has benefits of reduced distortion due to off-resonance, in-plane flow and EPI delay misalignment. Furthermore, the use of EPI with PAGE has inherent fat-water separation and has been used to provide off-resonance correction using a technique referred to as lipid elimination with an echo-shifting N/2-ghost acquisition (LEENA), and may further generalized using the multi-point Dixon method. Other applications of PAGE include cancelling ghosts which arise due to amplitude or phase variation during the approach to steady state. Parallel imaging requires estimates of the complex coil sensitivities. In vivo estimates may be derived by temporally varying the phase encode ordering to obtain a full k-space dataset in a scheme similar to the autocalibrating TSENSE method. This scheme is a generalization of the UNFOLD method used for removing aliasing in undersampled acquisitions. The more general scheme may be used to modulate each EPI ghost image to a separate temporal frequency as described in this paper.

Steady-state free precession MR imaging: improved myocardial tag persistence and signal-to-noise ratio for analysis of myocardial motion

Tagging with balanced steady-state free-precession (SSFP) magnetic resonance (MR) imaging by using a steady-state storage scheme for myocardial motion analysis was evaluated. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), blood-tissue contrast, and tag persistence in volunteers and phantoms showed improved performance of SSFP imaging with tagging compared with that of radiofrequency spoiled gradient-echo (SPGR) MR imaging with tagging. Choice of flip angle with SSFP imaging involved a trade-off among SNR, blood-tissue contrast, and tag persistence. Increased SNR and tag persistence can be achieved simultaneously with SSFP imaging compared with SPGR tagging methods. As a result, the proposed technique may be useful for analysis of diastolic ventricular function.

Myocardial tagging with SSFP

This work presents the first implementation of myocardial tagging with refocused steady-state free precession (SSFP) and magnetization preparation. The combination of myocardial tagging (a noninvasive method for quantitative measurement of regional and global cardiac function) with the high tissue signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) obtained with SSFP is shown to yield improvements in terms of the myocardium-tag contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and tag persistence when compared to the current standard fast gradient-echo (FGRE) tagging protocol. Myocardium-tag CNR and tag persistence were studied using numerical simulations as well as phantom and human experiments. Both quantities were found to decrease with increasing imaging flip angle (alpha) due to an increased tag decay rate and a decrease in myocardial steady-state signal. However, higher alpha yielded better blood-myocardium contrast, indicating that optimal alpha is dependent on the application: higher alpha for better blood-myocardium boundary visualization, and lower alpha for better tag persistence. SSFP tagging provided the same myocardium-tag CNR as FGRE tagging when acquired at four times the bandwidth and better tag- and blood-myocardium CNRs than FGRE tagging when acquired at equal or twice the receiver bandwidth (RBW). The increased acquisition efficiency of SSFP allowed decreases in breath-hold duration, or increases in temporal resolution, as compared to FGRE.