Real-time cardiovascular PC imaging using undersampled radial FLASH and nonlinear inverse reconstruction

Introduction: Velocity-encoded phase-contrast MRI is a well established method for quantitative mapping of flow velocities. Cardiac MRI studies commonly rely on ECG and respiration synchronized cine acquisitions of multiple heartbeats either in the state of free breathing or suspended respiration. This approach may be affected with temporal and/or spatial averaging of phase information obtained from multiple cycles and as a result might lead to underestimating of flow parameters when compared to other methods. Recently, significant advancements have been made for real time cardiovascular imaging with undersampled radial FLASH and nonlinear inverse reconstruction [1, 2]. In this study we combine this approach with velocity-encoded phase contrast (PC) to achieve real time flow MRI of the ascending and descending aorta.