Effect of segmentation of k-space in SSFP flow artifacts

Background Steady State Free Precession is a fast technique with high contrast between myocardium and blood in cardiovascular MR imaging. According to the time consuming data acquisition and short cardiac cycle (almost 0.9 second), data is obtained in several heartbeats depending on the number of frames and K-space size. The K-Space is divided to segments and each segment is acquired in one cardiac cycle. However, spins in the flowing blood do not experience enough pulses to reach the steady state condition. As a result, shadows called flow artifacts appear in images. In this study, we investigate the flow artifacts and in particular, how the number of frames (or segments) and in-plane velocity affect them.