Single breath-hold real-time MR cardiac cine for evaluation of left ventricular function

Background Magnetic Resonance (MR) cardiac cine is generally accepted as the gold standard for left ventricular (LV) volume assessment. Recently, Real-Time (RT) cine with sparse sampling technique and iterative reconstruction has been applied to accelerate cine MR. However, in prospective electrocardiogram (ECG) triggered RT cine MR, it may be difficult to capture the true end diastole phase because of the finite time needed to detect the next ECG trigger, which may lead to underestimation of end diastolic volume (EDV), stroke volume (SV), and ejection fraction (EF) when compared with retrospective ECG gated standard cine MR. In this study we propose an alternative approach to overcome this limitation, by acquiring sparse RT cine MR data over two heart beats, to capture the complete end diastole between the first and second heart beats. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic quality and accuracy of RT-based single-breath-hold cine MR for the quantification of LV function compared with standard multi-breath-hold cine MR.