High resolution, free-breathing coronary artery imaging with >99% respiratory efficiency: comparing beat to beat respiratory motion correction with navigator gating

Introduction: High-resolution coronary artery imaging is commonly gated to end-expiration using diaphragmatic navigator echoes, resulting in inherently low respiratory efficiency (RE) which is further exacerbated by respiratory drift. Recently, it was demonstrated that epicardial fat can be used as a marker of coronary artery position in a 3D beat-to-beat non-model based subject-specific respiratory motion correction (B2B-RMC) technique [1]. We propose that this technique, which has a respiratory efficiency close to 100%, can compensate for respiratory motion in high resolution coronary artery imaging as effectively as a standard navigator gated technique which has much poorer and highly variable efficiency.