Stack-of-spirals and cones trajectories have been proposed to permit breath-hold ultrashort-echo-time (UTE) acquisitions of the human lung, although further acceleration would be valuable to permit improvements such as shorter breath-holds for respiratory comprised patients or higher spatial resolution. In this work, an accelerated UTE 3D stack-of-spirals pulse sequence was implemented using undersampled, dual-density spiral waveforms for acquisition and a SPIRiT-based algorithm for image reconstruction. Preliminary testing in healthy volunteers using 2-fold acceleration provided image quality comparable to that achieved with the original, unaccelerated pulse sequence.
The prototype UTE 3D stack-of-spirals acquisition was based on a commercial version of 3D spoiled gradient-echo imaging (VIBE, Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany), modified as described in ref. 4 to support a stack-of-spirals acquisition and a very short TE, which was achieved by using non-spatially-selective RF excitation and by minimizing the duration of each through-plane phase-encoding gradient waveform while simultaneously minimizing the TE5. This permitted a TE of 50 µs for the central k-space plane. In-plane acceleration was implemented by acquiring a reduced number of spiral interleaves for each k-space plane (e.g., every second or third interleave), and reconstructing the resulting data using a SPIRiT6-based algorithm implemented on the MR scanner. For image reconstruction, 3D data were first Fourier transformed along the third dimension, and a SPIRiT-based reconstruction was then performed on each plane of undersampled spiral data. Dual-density spiral waveforms were used to provide fully sampled data for the central portion of each k-space plane, and undersampled data for the remainder.
The accelerated UTE 3D stack-of-spirals acquisition was tested on 1.5T (MAGNETOM Aera, Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany) and 3T (MAGNETOM Prisma, Siemens) MR scanners in phantoms and in healthy volunteers, after obtaining informed consent. Compared to the original UTE 3D stack-of-spirals acquisition, the acceleration was used in subjects to perform breath-hold whole-lung acquisitions with a reduced acquisition time, to achieve increased spatial resolution during approximately the same acquisition time, and to permit double-echo imaging with reduced acquisition time.
The performance of the acquisition and reconstruction algorithm for 2- and 3-fold acceleration is illustrated with phantom images in Fig. 1. The left column presents images from direct reconstruction of the undersampled data, showing obvious undersampling artifacts. The right column presents images from the SPIRiT-based algorithm; 2-fold acceleration shows essentially no artifacts, and 3-fold acceleration shows only very minor remaining artifacts.
The original UTE 3D stack-of-spirals acquisition could provide spatial resolution of approximately 2 x 2 x 5 mm3 for the adult chest from a 16-s breath-hold acquisition. Figure 2 compares results from the original technique to those from 2-fold acceleration, providing the same spatial resolution from an 8-s breath-hold acquisition. The image quality appears very similar for the original and accelerated acquisitions. Figure 3 shows results from the same subject wherein the acceleration was used to increase spatial resolution to 2 x 2 x 2.5 mm3 for an acquisition time of 17 s. Finally, Fig. 4 illustrates acquisition of two echo times (50 µs and 2.6 ms) during a 9-s breath hold, and shows a decrease in signal intensity of the lung tissue with the relatively small 2.6-ms increase in echo time, as expected.
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