Highly accelerated 3D myocardial late fadolinium enhancement MRI using ESPIRiT compressed sensing: initial feasibility

Background Myocardial late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) MRI has become a standard clinical exam for characterizing myocardial viability after infarction and for assessing many nonischemic myocardial diseaseses. Typically, a 3D slab covering the myocardium is scanned within a single breath-hold. However, 3D LGE with sufficient resolution and slice coverage requires a long scan time and is challenging in cardiac patients with limited breath-hold capability. Recently, compressed sensing (CS) [1] has demonstrated the ability to further accelerate MRI on top of parallel imaging (PI) and has demonstrated promising results for 3D LGE [2]. This work intended to evaluate the feasibility of a CS-PI method based on ESPIRiT [3-5] and optimize its data acquisition for improving the robustness of 3D LGE with high acceleration.