BMART-Enabled Field-Map Combination of Projection-Reconstruction Phase-Cycled SSFP Cardiac Cine for Banding and Flow-Artifact Reduction

Abstract: Purpose: To develop a method for banding-free bSSFP cardiac cine with substantially reduced flow artifacts. Methods: A projection-reconstruction (PR) trajectory is proposed for a frequency-modulated cine sequence, facilitating reconstruction of three phase cycles and a field-map time series from a short, breath-held scan. Data is also acquired during the gradient rewinders to enable generation of field maps using BMART, B$_0$ mapping using rewinding trajectories, where the rewind data forms the second TE image for calculating the field map. A field-map-based combination method is developed which weights the phase-cycle component images to include only passband signal in the final cine images, and exclude stopband and near-band flow artifacts. Results: The weights derived from the BMART-generated field maps mask out banding and near-band flow artifacts in and around the heart. Therefore, the field-map-based phase-cycle combination, which is facilitated by the PR acquisition with BMART, results in more homogeneous blood pools and reduced hyperintense regions than root-sum-of-squares. Conclusion: With the proposed techniques, using a non-Cartesian trajectory for a frequency-modulated cine sequence enables flow-artifact-reduced banding-free cardiac imaging within a short breath-hold.