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arXiv · 2202.03021

Free-breathing motion compensated 4D (3D+respiration) T2-weighted turbo spin-echo MRI for body imaging

T. Bruijnen·T. Schake·O. Akdag·C. V. M. Bruel·J. J. W. Lagendijk·C. A. T. van den Berg·R. H. N. Tijssen
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Abstract

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a free-breathing respiratory motion compensated 4D (3D+respiration) $T_2$-weighted turbo spin echo sequence with application to radiology and MR-guided radiotherapy. Methods: k-space data are continuously acquired using a rewound Cartesian acquisition with spiral profile ordering (rCASPR) to provide matching contrast to the conventional linear phase encode ordering and to sort data into multiple respiratory phases. Low-resolution respiratory-correlated 4D images were reconstructed with compressed sensing and used to estimate non-rigid deformation vector fields, which were subsequently used for a motion compensated image reconstruction. rCASPR sampling was compared to linear and CASPR sampling in terms of point-spread-function (PSF) and image contrast with in silico, phantom and in vivo experiments. Reconstruction parameters for low-resolution 4D-MRI (spatial resolution and temporal regularization) were determined using a grid search. The proposed motion compensated rCASPR was evaluated in eight healthy volunteers and compared to free-breathing scans with linear sampling. Image quality was compared based on visual inspection and quantitatively by means of the gradient entropy. Results: rCASPR provided a superior PSF (similar in ky and narrower in kz) and showed no considerable differences in images contrast compared to linear sampling. The optimal 4D-MRI reconstruction parameters were spatial resolution=$4.5 mm^3$ and $λ_t=10^{-4}$. The groupwise average gradient entropy was 22.31 for linear, 22.20 for rCASPR, 22.14 for soft-gated rCASPR and 22.02 for motion compensated rCASPR. Conclusion: The proposed motion compensated rCASPR enables high quality free-breathing T2-TSE with minimal changes in image contrast and scan time. The proposed method therefore enables direct transfer of clinically used 3D TSE sequences to free-breathing.

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T. Bruijnen, T. Schake, O. Akdag, C. V. M. Bruel, J. J. W. Lagendijk, C. A. T. van den Berg, R. H. N. Tijssen. 2022-02-07. Free-breathing motion compensated 4D (3D+respiration) T2-weighted turbo spin-echo MRI for body imaging. https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03021

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