Comparison of respiratory motion suppression techniques for 4D flow MRI

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this work was to assess the impact of respiratory motion and to compare methods for suppression of respiratory motion artifacts in 4D Flow MRI.MethodsA numerical 3D aorta phantom was designed based on an aorta velocity field obtained by computational fluid mechanics. Motion‐distorted 4D Flow MRI measurements were simulated and several different motion‐suppression techniques were evaluated: Gating with fixed acceptance window size, gating with different window sizes in inner and outer k‐space, and k‐space reordering. Additionally, different spatial resolutions were simulated.ResultsRespiratory motion reduced the image quality. All motion‐suppression techniques improved the data quality. Flow rate errors of up to 30% without gating could be reduced to less than 2.5% with the most successful motion suppression methods. Weighted gating and gating combined with k‐space reordering were advantageous compared with conventional fixed‐window gating. Spatial resolutions finer than the amount of accepted motion did not lead to improved results.ConclusionRespiratory motion affects 4D Flow MRI data. Several different motion suppression techniques exist that are capable of reducing the errors associated with respiratory motion. Spatial resolutions finer than the degree of accepted respiratory motion do not result in improved data quality. Magn Reson Med 78:1877–1882, 2017. © 2017 The Authors Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non‐Commercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Multipoint 5D flow cardiovascular magnetic resonance - accelerated cardiac- and respiratory-motion resolved mapping of mean and turbulent velocities

“…A small bias towards higher velocities was observed for 5D Flow LLR compared to the 4D Flow reference. This can be related to previous findings that respiratory motion leads to blurring of the image [20, 51] which corresponds to spatial low-pass filtering and is therefore likely to reduce peak velocities.…”

“…Moreover, data acquisition without respiratory motion compensation leads to decreased image quality [14]. Accordingly, navigator-based respiratory gating is typically employed [20]. Unfortunately, respiratory gating makes scan times unpredictable, as gating efficiencies vary among subjects and often even during a single scan.…”

Data Quality and Optimal Background Correction Order of Respiratory‐Gated k‐Space Segmented Spoiled Gradient Echo (SGRE) and Echo Planar Imaging (EPI)‐Based 4D Flow MRI

“…Garg et al speculate that the better EPI performance found in their study could be explained by a shorter acquisition time that could have reduced respiratory artifacts in their nonrespiratory motion suppressed sequences. Here, we employed a respiratory navigator, as it drastically decreases errors associated with respiratory motion in 4D Flow MRI . Indeed, the results for SGRE were considerably better in our study, but we find it unlikely that the lack of respiratory motion compression would affect the SGRE and EPI sequence very differently.…”

k‐t accelerated aortic 4D flow MRI in under two minutes: Feasibility and impact of resolution, k‐space sampling patterns, and respiratory navigator gating on hemodynamic measurements

“…The volunteer and patient studies were used to evaluate respiratory control effects. Furthermore, it would be interesting to compare in vivo in a future work the different existing respiration motion correction methods, as was recently performed using numerical simulations . Finally, technical limitations include the anisotropic voxel size, and long reconstruction times when using the PEAK‐GRAPPA method, which was up to 10 minutes for the SRes1 datasets.…”