Free-breathing imaging of the heart using 2D cine-GRICS (generalized reconstruction by inversion of coupled systems) with assessment of ventricular volumes and function

Purpose: To assess cardiac function by means of a novel free-breathing cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) strategy. Materials and Methods: A stack of ungated 2D steady-state free precession (SSFP) slices was acquired during free breathing and reconstructed as cardiac cine imaging based on the generalized reconstruction by inversion of coupled systems (GRICS). A motion-compensated sliding window approach allows reconstructing cine movies with most motion artifacts cancelled. The proposed reconstruction uses prior knowledge from respiratory belts and electrocardiogram recordings and features a piecewise linear model that relates the electrocardiogram signal to cardiac displacements. The free-breathing protocol was validated in six subjects against a standard breath-held protocol. Results: Image sharpness, as assessed by the image gradient entropy, was comparable to that of breath-held images and significantly better than in uncorrected images. Volumetric parameters of cardiac function in the left ventricle (LV) and right ventricle (RV) were similar, including end-systolic volumes, end-diastolic volumes and mass, stroke volumes, and ejection fractions (with differences of 3% ± 2.4 in the LV and 2.9% ± 4.4 in the RV). The duration of the free-breathing protocol was nearly the same as the breath-held protocol. Conclusion: Free-breathing cine-GRICS enables accurate assessment of volumetric parameters of cardiac function with efficient correction of motion. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2012;340-351. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.