Enhancing the Motion Robustness of Breath‐Held
3D T1
‐Weighted Abdominal
MRI
Using a Cartesian Acquisition With Spiral Profile Ordering
Alice Scudeletti, Jonathan Stelter, Kilian Weiss, Lisa Steinhelfer, Robert L. Walter, Rickmer F. Braren, Dimitrios C. Karampinos ABSTRACT
Purpose
To develop and validate a novel self‐gated motion‐robust 3D T1‐weighted gradient echo imaging framework based on a Cartesian acquisition with spiral profile ordering (CASPR) for abdominal imaging under unstable breath‐hold conditions.
Methods
The CASPR trajectory was evaluated using frequency encoding in the anterior‐to‐posterior (AP) direction for respiratory motion robustness. The CASPR's intrinsic k‐space center oversampling was exploited to directly extract a self‐gated respiratory signal from the acquired data. A soft‐gating motion compensation framework was integrated into the reconstruction pipeline. The method was validated in 10 healthy volunteers (five males and five females) and compared to a Cartesian acquisition with pseudorandom undersampling.
Results
Both CASPR and Cartesian acquisition with pseudorandom undersampling exhibited motion artifacts under unstable breath‐hold conditions without retrospective correction. The proposed self‐gated CASPR framework enabled reliable extraction of the respiratory signal directly from the AP readout. Soft gating significantly improved the image quality of motion‐corrupted scans.
Conclusion
This study introduces a novel self‐gated CASPR‐based framework for respiratory motion compensation in 3D abdominal MRI, in cases of incomplete and delayed breath‐holds. The method enables the extraction of the self‐navigator signal along the anterior‐to‐posterior axis and compensates for motion using a soft‐gating technique.