Contrast-enhanced 4D radial coronary artery imaging at 3.0 T within a single breath-hold

Coronary magnetic resonance angiography data are usually acquired during mid-diastole of each heartbeat to minimize cardiac motion related artifacts. The proper trigger delay time, which may vary widely among subjects, must be determined individually for each subject before data acquisition to achieve optimal image quality. These complications could be resolved by acquiring contiguous cardiac phase images through the cardiac cycle. In this study, we used a radial sampling technique to acquire 3D cine coronary artery images at 3 T within a single breath-hold. An extravascular, paramagnetic contrast agent was i.v. administered to improve the blood signal intensity. Relatively high temporal resolution and spatial resolution were achieved simultaneously with radial sampling, parallel data acquisition, and interleaved sliding window image reconstruction. Volunteer studies demonstrate the feasibility of this technique in acquiring 4D coronary artery images and the flexibility in postprocessing of 3D image sets.