Authors
Tan Z, Unterberg-Buchwald C, Blumenthal M, Scholand N, Schaten P, Holme C, Wang X, Raddatz D, Uecker M
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Citation
IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2022 Dec 9;PP.
Abstract
This work introduced a stack-of-radial multi-echo asymmetric-echo MRI sequence for free-breathing liver volumetric acquisition. Regularized model-based reconstruction was implemented in Berkeley Advanced Reconstruction Toolbox (BART) to jointly estimate all physical parameter maps (water, fat, R*2, and B0 field inhomogeneity maps) and coil sensitivity maps from self-gated k-space data. Specifically, locally low rank and temporal total variation regularization were employed directly on physical parameter maps. The proposed free-breathing radial technique was tested on a water/fat & iron phantom, a young volunteer, and obesity/diabetes/hepatic steatosis patients. Quantitative fat fraction and R*2 accuracy were confirmed by comparing our technique with the reference breath-hold Cartesian scan. The multi-echo radial sampling sequence achieves fast k-space coverage and is robust to motion. Moreover, the proposed motion-resolved model-based reconstruction allows for free-breathing liver fat and R*2 quantification in multiple motion states. Overall, our proposed technique offers a convenient tool for non-invasive liver assessment with no breath holding requirement.
