Free-breathing whole-heart coronary MR angiography on a clinical scanner in four minutes

Purpose To set up a robust and patient‐friendly whole‐heart protocol based on 32‐receive‐channel technology that will potentially allow a large part of the patient population to be addressed. Materials and Methods Ten volunteers were examined on a clinical 1.5 T scanner equipped with a 32‐channel data acquisition system using an experimental 32‐element coil array. A magnetization‐prepared, navigator‐gated and ‐tracked 3D Cartesian balanced FFE sequence was used for whole‐heart coronary MR angiography (MRA). With the use of sensitivity encoding (SENSE) and partial Fourier encoding for scan acceleration, nearly isotropic high‐resolution data sets were acquired during free breathing in four minutes. Results A high contrast and sufficient signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) were obtained, which allowed visualization of the major vessels up to the distal regions and detection of major branches. Phase encoding in the anterior–posterior (AP) direction was the most favorable SENSE configuration and allowed a reasonable scan time reduction with moderate SENSE factors. Conclusion The employed 32‐receive channel technology enabled a robust trade‐off among SNR, spatial resolution, and scan time. In this study the most robust results were obtained using the smallest possible SENSE factors for a given voxel size and scan time. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.