3T Coronary MRA using 3D Multi-interleaved Multi-echo Acquisition and VARPRO Fat-water Separation

Introduction: Coronary MR Angiography is a valuable tool for non-invasive assessment of coronary arteries. Presently, contrastenhanced, fat-saturated, ECG-triggered and navigator-gated 3D spoiled gradient-echo sequence is employed for whole-heart Coronary MRA at 3T. However, large static field variations at 3T frequently result in non-uniform fat-suppression over the field-of-view (FOV), obscuring the delineation of coronary arteries. Multi-echo Dixon approaches utilizing iterative decomposition have been shown to provide robust fat-water separation even in the presence of large field inhomogeneities. In this study, an ECG-triggered navigator-gated 3D spoiled gradient-echo multi-interleaved multi-echo (GRE-MEMI) pulse sequence is introduced which utilizes VARPRO fat-water separation to achieve reliable fat-suppression and provides enhanced visualization of coronary arteries.