Free-breathing myocardial perfusion MRI using SW-CG-HYPR and motion correction

First-pass perfusion MRI is a promising technique to detect ischemic heart disease. Sliding window (SW) conjugate-gradient (CG) highly constrained back-projection reconstruction (HYPR) (SW-CG-HYPR) has been proposed to increase spatial coverage, spatial resolution, and SNR. However, this method is sensitive to respiratory motion and thus requires breath-hold. This work presents a non-model-based motion correction method combined with SW-CG-HYPR to perform free-breathing myocardial MR imaging. Simulation studies were first performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed motion correction method and its independence from the pattern of the respiratory motion. After that, in vivo studies were performed in six healthy volunteers. From all of the volunteer studies, the image quality score of free breathing perfusion images with motion correction (3.11 ± 0.34) is improved compared with that of images without motion correction (2.27 ± 0.32), and is comparable with that of successful breath-hold images (3.12 ± 0.38). This result was further validated by a quantitative sharpness analysis. The left ventricle and myocardium signal changes in motion corrected free-breathing perfusion images were closely correlated to those observed in breath-hold images. The correlation coefficient is 0.9764 for myocardial signals. Bland-Altman analysis confirmed the agreement between the freebreathing SW-CG-HYPR method with motion correction and the breath-hold SW-CG-HYPR. This technique may allow myocardial perfusion MRI during free breathing.