Highly efficient nonrigid motion corrected 3D whole-heart coronary vessel wall imaging

PURPOSE: To develop a respiratory motion correction framework to accelerate free-breathing three-dimensional (3D) whole-heart coronary lumen and coronary vessel wall MRI. METHODS: We developed a 3D flow-independent approach for vessel wall imaging based on the subtraction of data with and without T2-preparation prepulses acquired interleaved with image navigators. The proposed method corrects both datasets to the same respiratory position using beat-to-beat translation and bin-to-bin nonrigid corrections, producing coregistered, motion-corrected coronary lumen and coronary vessel wall images. The proposed method was studied in 10 healthy subjects and was compared with beat-to-beat translational correction (TC) and no motion correction for the left and right coronary arteries. Additionally, the coronary lumen images were compared with a 6-mm diaphragmatic navigator gated and tracked scan. RESULTS: No significant differences (P > 0.01) were found between the proposed method and the gated and tracked scan for coronary lumen, despite an average improvement in scan efficiency to 96% from 59%. Significant differences (P < 0.01) were found in right coronary artery vessel wall thickness, right coronary artery vessel wall sharpness, and vessel wall visual score between the proposed method and TC. CONCLUSION: The feasibility of a highly efficient motion correction framework for simultaneous whole-heart coronary lumen and vessel wall has been demonstrated