First-pass myocardial perfusion imaging with whole ventricular coverage using L1-SPIRIT accelerated spiral trajectories

Background First-pass perfusion imaging using cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) has become clinically applicable as an important tool for diagnosing coronary artery disease. We have recently demonstrated that high quality firstpass images can be acquired with an optimized spiral pulse sequence, but this sequence is only capable of imaging 3 short axis slices of the heart for a maximum heart rate of 110 bpm. In order to achieve whole ventricular coverage, we have developed an accelerated spiral sequence using the Parallel Imaging and Compressed Sensing technique L1-SPIRIT. Methods To evaluate and develop the accelerated reconstruction we retrospectively down-sampled data acquired from a fullysampled variable density (VD) spiral perfusion data set acquired on a 1.5T scanner. Pulse sequence parameters included: TE 1.0 ms, TR 11 ms, FOV 320 mm, in-plane resolution 1.75 mm, 8 interleaves, readout duration 8.1ms per interleave, saturation time 8 ms. We then designed a 4x accelerated pulse sequence which prospectively collected only 2 of 8 interleaves, and collects two perfusion images after each saturation pulse. Resting perfusion imaging was performed after injection of 0.1 mmol/kg of