LAUSR

PURPOSE Develop a novel approach for 2D breath-hold cardiac cine from a single heartbeat, by combining cardiac motion corrected reconstructions and non-rigidly aligned patch-based regularization. METHODS Conventional cardiac cine imaging is obtained via motion resolved reconstructions of data acquired over multiple heartbeats. Here, we achieve single-heartbeat cine imaging by incorporating non-rigid cardiac motion correction into the reconstruction of each cardiac phase, in conjunction with a motion-aligned patch-based regularization. The proposed Motion Corrected CINE (MC-CINE) incorporates all acquired data into the reconstruction of each (motion corrected) cardiac phase, resulting in a better posed problem than motion resolved approaches. MC-CINE was compared to iterative SENSE and XD-GRASP in fourteen healthy subjects in terms of image sharpness, reader scoring (1-5 range) and reader ranking (1-9 range) of image quality, and single-slice left ventricular assessment. RESULTS MC-CINE was significantly superior to both iterative SENSE and XD-GRASP using 20, 2 and 1 heartbeat(s). Iterative SENSE, XD-GRASP and MC-CINE achieved sharpness of 74%, 74% and 82% using 20 heartbeats, and 53%, 66% and 82% with 1 heartbeat, respectively. Corresponding results for reader scores were 4.0, 4.7 and 4.9, with 20 heartbeats, and 1.1, 3.0 and 3.9 with 1 heartbeat. Corresponding results for reader rankings were 5.3, 7.3 and 8.6 with 20 heartbeats, and 1.0, 3.2 and 5.4 with 1 heartbeat. MC-CINE using a single heartbeat presented non-significant differences in image quality to iterative SENSE with 20 heartbeats. MC-CINE and XD-GRASP at one heartbeat both presented a non-significant negative bias of <2% in ejection fraction relative to the reference iterative SENSE. CONCLUSION The proposed MC-CINE significantly improves image quality relative to iterative SENSE and XD-GRASP, enabling 2D cine from a single heartbeat.