Concentric rings with k-t acceleration enables rapid and effective fat-water-separated cardiac cine MRI at 3 T

Background Cine imaging is the core technique for cardiac MRI studies. Often times, it is also essential to have information identifying fat signal in the heart to characterize masses, detect fatty infiltration and ARVD, discern fat from fibrosis in LGE imaging, and improve visualization of the pericardium. However, such information traditionally requires additional scans that obtain fat-suppressed images for comparison. This prolongs the examination time, is susceptible to mis-registration between the fatsuppressed and fat-visible images, and does not directly utilize positive contrast from fat. In this work, we present an integrated cardiac MRI technique that produces coregistered cines of both water and fat signal from a rapid single-breath-hold scan.