Accelerated myocardial perfusion imaging using saturation-recovery spiral-in/out SSFP

Background Myocardial first-pass perfusion imaging is a promising diagnostic tool for the assessment of ischemic heart disease. Spiral imaging, due to its high acquisition speed and robustness against motion artifacts, has been successfully combined with the saturation recovery (SR) GRE sequence using a traditional spiral-out trajectory. However, a SR SSFP sequence can provide higher SNR and use shorter saturation recovery time. In addition, as compared to a spiral-out trajectory, the spiral-in/out trajectory in an SSFP sequence can take advantage of the refocusing mechanism at TE=TR/2 to increase SNR and reduce off-resonance artifacts. Furthermore, spatial and temporal parallel imaging methods can be used to achieve up to 4x acceleration without degrading the image quality. In this study, we have implemented a spiral-in/out SR SSFP sequence and imaged rest myocardial perfusion.