Dual-excitation flip-angle simultaneous cine and T-1 mapping using spiral acquisition with respiratory and cardiac self-gating

Purpose: To develop a free-breathing cardiac self-gated technique that provides cine images and B-1(+) slice profile-corrected T-1 maps from a single acquisition. Methods: Without breath-holding or electrocardiogram gating, data were acquired continuously on a 3T scanner using a golden-angle gradient-echo spiral pulse sequence, with an inversion RF pulse applied every 4 seconds. Flip angles of 3 degrees and 15 degrees were used for readouts after the first four and second four inversions. Self-gating cardiac triggers were extracted from heart image navigators, and respiratory motion was corrected by rigid registration on each heartbeat. Cine images were reconstructed from the steady-state portion of 15 degrees readouts using a low-rank plus sparse reconstruction. The T-1 maps were fit using a projection onto convex sets approach from images reconstructed using slice profile-corrected dictionary learning. This strategy was evaluated in a phantom and 14 human subjects. Results: The self-gated signal demonstrated close agreement with the acquired electrocardiogram signal. The image quality for the proposed cine images and standard clinical balanced SSFP images were 4.31 (+/- 0.50) and 4.65 (+/- 0.30), respectively. The slice profile-corrected T-1 values were similar to those of the inversion-recovery spin-echo technique in phantom, and had a higher global T-1 value than that of MOLLI in human subjects. Conclusions: Cine and T-1 mapping using spiral acquisition with respiratory and cardiac self-gating successfully acquired T-1 maps and cine images in a single acquisition without the need for electrocardiogram gating or breath-holding. This dual-excitation flip-angle approach provides a novel approach for measuring T-1 while accounting for B-1(+) and slice profile effect on the apparent T-1*.