Golden angle radial reordering (GA) has been applied in many abdominal and neurological imaging applications to allow for retrospective choice of temporal resolution by providing a near-uniform k-space sampling within any image reconstruction time window [1]. However, its application in cardiac imaging is limited because the ECG-gated acquisition, which is required in most cases, breaks a single reconstruction window into several temporally isolated k-space data so that the k-space coverage may not be as uniform as GA without ECG gating (Fig. 1a) [2]. Therefore, we sought to investigate the image artifacts caused by applying GA to ECG-gated cardiac imaging and propose a segmented GA method to address this issue.
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Methods
The proposed segmented GA method calculates the azimuthal angle based on the total number of k-space segments S and the current segment index n (Eq.1). In the example shown in Fig. 1b, there are 4 k-space segments and each one was acquired within one of the 4 ECG-RR intervals. Since each segment is acquired in a golden-ratio manner, any subset of these measurements forms a near-uniform sampling of the current segment and together with other segments, forms a near-uniform sampling of the entire k-space.
Computer simulations based on a Shepp-Logan phantom were performed to compare the k-space sampling pattern of conventional non-ECG-gated GA, ECG-gated GA and the segmented GA (12 simulated heartbeats, 100-120 radial views in each heartbeat, views for reconstruction N=60, 96, 192 and 240). In-vivo 2D radial and 3D "stack-of-stars" breath-hold, ECG-gated cardiac CINE were acquired on 8 healthy volunteers using both ECG-gated GA and segmented GA (1.5T; bSSFP; 1.6 /3.3ms; FA=50; 1.3x1.3x6mm3).
Results
Fig. 2a shows the simulated k-space sampling patterns and reconstructed images (N=60). Both the segmented GA and conventional GA provided a near-uniform k-space sampling pattern and good image quality. However, the ECG-gated GA image had streaking artifacts due to poor sampling uniformity. The in-vivo 2D CINE images shown in Fig. 2b were reconstructed using 216 views with temporal resolution of 48ms. Based on 8 volunteer's data, the segmented GA method provided images with higher SNR and less streaking artifacts compared to ECG-gated GA (blood pool SNR: 6.4±0.3 vs 3.4±0.7 P<0.05). The 3D CINE images using ECG-gated GA (144 views, temporal resolution 120ms) in Fig. 2b was non-diagnostic due to strong streaking artifacts while the one using segmented GA provided much better image quality even though same number of radial views were used.
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Conclusions
The proposed segmented GA method successfully addresses the non-uniform sampling issue when combining conventional GA with ECG gating and can be potentially applied to any ECG-gated cardiac imaging applications, including cine and flow imaging, to allow retrospective selection of temporal resolution.
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Funding
N/A.
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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