Technical note: Accelerated nonrigid motion‐compensated isotropic 3D coronary MR angiography

PURPOSE: To develop an accelerated and nonrigid motion‐compensated technique for efficient isotropic 3D whole‐heart coronary magnetic resonance angiography (CMRA) with Cartesian acquisition. METHODS: Highly efficient whole‐heart 3D CMRA was achieved by combining image reconstruction from undersampled data using compressed sensing (CS) with a nonrigid motion compensation framework. Undersampled acquisition was performed using a variable‐density Cartesian trajectory with radial order (VD‐CAPR). Motion correction was performed in two steps: beat‐to‐beat 2D translational correction with motion estimated from interleaved image navigators, and bin‐to‐bin 3D nonrigid correction with motion estimated from respiratory‐resolved images reconstructed from undersampled 3D CMRA data using CS. Nonrigid motion fields were incorporated into an undersampled motion‐compensated reconstruction, which combines CS with the general matrix description formalism. The proposed approach was tested on 10 healthy subjects and compared against a conventional twofold accelerated 5‐mm navigator‐gated and tracked acquisition. RESULTS: The proposed method achieves isotropic 1.2‐mm Cartesian whole‐heart CMRA in 5 min ± 1 min (~8× acceleration). The proposed approach provides good‐quality images of the left and right coronary arteries, comparable to those of a twofold accelerated navigator‐gated and tracked acquisition, but scan time was up to about four times faster. For both coronaries, no significant differences (P > 0.05) in vessel sharpness and length were found between the proposed method and reference scan. CONCLUSION: The feasibility of a highly efficient motion‐compensated reconstruction framework for accelerated 3D CMRA has been demonstrated in healthy subjects. Further investigation is required to assess the clinical value of the method.