Nonlinear myocardial perfusion imaging with motion corrected reconstruction: validation via quantitative flow mapping

Background Myocardial perfusion imaging typically uses saturation recovery to generate T1 contrast during the Gd passage. Imaging protocols lead to a tradeoff between spatial/ temporal resolution, myocardial coverage, and SNR. To improve resolution while maintaining the image quality we propose a nonlinear iterative reconstruction. This method explicitly integrates respiratory motion correction into the reconstruction to permit spatio-temporal regularization in the presence of motion. Unlike most k-t methods, the motion corrected images are directly output. In this way, complete free-breathing acquisition is achieved. Nonlinear iterative reconstruction is difficult to characterize since implicit filtering resulting from regularization is signal dependent. We propose to validate the proposed method by comparing quantitative myocardial blood flow (MBF) against linear reconstruction.