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Purpose: To present and validate a manifold learning (ML)-based method that estimates the respiratory signal directly from undersampled k-space data and that can be applied for respiratory self-gated liver MRI., Methods: ML methods embed high-dimensional space data in a low-dimensional space while preserving their characteristic properties. These methods have been used to estimate one-dimensional respiratory motion (low-dimensional manifold) from a set of high-dimensional free-breathing abdominal MR images. These approaches require MR images to be reconstructed first from the acquired undersampled data. Recently, the concept of compressive manifold learning (CML) has been introduced that combines compressed sensing with ML by learning low-dimensional manifolds directly from a partial set of compressed measurements, provided that the sampling satisfies the restricted isometry property. We propose to use the CML concept to extract the respiratory signal directly from undersampled k-space data., Results: Simulation results from free-breathing abdominal MR data show that CML can accurately estimate respiratory motion from highly retrospectively undersampled k-space (up to 25-fold acceleration under ideal assumptions). Prospective free-breathing golden-angle radial two-dimensional (2D) acquisitions further demonstrate the feasibility of the CML method for respiratory self-gating acquisition, estimating the respiratory motion from up to 15-fold accelerated MR data., Conclusion: The proposed method performs accurate respiratory signal estimation from highly undersampled k-space data and can be used for respiratory self-navigated 2D liver MRI., (Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

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., (Copyright © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Motion occurring during magnetic resonance imaging acquisition is a major factor of image quality degradation. Self-navigation can help reduce artefacts by estimating motion from the acquired data to enable motion correction. Popular self-navigation techniques rely on the availability of a fully-sampled motion-free reference to register the motion corrupted data with. In the proposed technique, rigid motion parameters are derived using the inherent correlation between radial segments in k-space. The registration is performed exclusively in k-space using the Phase Correlation Method, a popular registration technique in computer vision. Robust and accurate registration has been carried out from radial segments composed of as few as 32 profiles. Successful self-navigation has been performed on 2-D dynamic brain scans corrupted with continuous motion for six volunteers. Retrospective motion correction using the derived self-navigation parameters resulted in significant improvement of image quality compared to the conventional sliding window. This work also demonstrates the benefits of using a bit-reversed ordering scheme to limit undesirable effects specific to retrospective motion correction on radial trajectories. This method provides a fast and efficient mean of measuring rigid motion directly in k-space from dynamic radial data under continuous motion.

Compressed sensing (CS) has been demonstrated to accelerate MRI acquisitions by reconstructing sparse images of good quality from highly undersampled data. Motion during MR scans can cause inconsistencies in k-space data, resulting in strong motion artifacts in the reconstructed images. For CS to be useful in these applications, motion correction techniques need to be combined with the undersampled reconstruction. Recently, joint motion correction and CS approaches have been proposed to partially correct for effects of motion. However, the main limitation of these approaches is that they can only correct for affine deformations. In this work, we propose a novel motion corrected CS framework for free-breathing dynamic cardiac MRI that incorporates a general motion correction formulation directly into the CS reconstruction. This framework can correct for arbitrary affine or nonrigid motion in the CS reconstructed cardiac images, while simultaneously benefiting from highly accelerated MR acquisition. The application of this approach is demonstrated both in simulations and in vivo data for 2D respiratory self-gated free-breathing cardiac CINE MRI, using a golden angle radial acquisition. Results show that this approach allows for the reconstruction of respiratory motion corrected cardiac CINE images with similar quality to breath-held acquisitions., (© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)