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Abstract

The purpose of this work was to develop an acquisition and reconstruction technique for two- and three-directional (2d and 3d) phase-contrast flow MRI in real time. A previous real-time MRI technique for one-directional (1d) through-plane flow was extended to 2d and 3d flow MRI by introducing in-plane flow sensitivity. The method employs highly undersampled radial FLASH sequences with sequential acquisitions of two or three flow-encoding datasets and one flow-compensated dataset. Echo times are minimized by merging the waveforms of flow-encoding and radial imaging gradients. For each velocity direction individually, model-based reconstructions by regularized nonlinear inversion jointly estimate an anatomical image, a set of coil sensitivities and a phase-contrast velocity map directly. The reconstructions take advantage of a dynamic phase reference obtained by interpolating consecutive flow-compensated acquisitions. Validations include pulsatile flow phantoms as well as in vivo studies of the human aorta at 3 T. The proposed method offers cross-sectional 2d and 3d flow MRI of the human aortic arch at 53 and 67 ms resolution, respectively, without ECG synchronization and during free breathing. The in-plane resolution was 1.5 × 1.5 mm2 and the slice thickness 6 mm. In conclusion, real-time multi-directional flow MRI offers new opportunities to study complex human blood flow without the risk of combining differential phase (i.e., velocity) information from multiple heartbeats as for ECG-gated data. The method would benefit from a further reduction of acquisition time and accelerated computing to allow for extended clinical trials.