Real time circular tagging is possible through radial acquisition

Background Real-time capturing of the myocardial function through CMR tagging is of great clinical importance. In circular tagging, tagline information manifests itself in k-space in an annular sub-region. This k-space characteristic in combination with polar acquisition schemes can be exploited to speed up the imaging. In our previous works, we showed that by selectively acquiring only this portion of k-space through circular sampling, it is feasible to capture tagline information with an acceleration factor of 8 [1]. We further described a coherent acquisition/reconstruction approach for radial tagging based on radial sampling of k-space [2]. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of that approach for circular tagging and evaluated its performance on phantom as well as human tagged images acquired with various numbers of radial projections.