Unmonitored Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging of rats at 7 T

Abstract Unmonitored cardiac images of a rat were acquired using a standard gradient echo sequences to study the artefact ghosting mainly caused by heart and respiration motion. All imaging experiments were performed using a transceiver circular-shaped coil and a preclinical magnetic resonance imager at 7 T. Heart images showed the ghosting artefact along the frequency encoding direction. However the image quality was not drastically affected by this type of ghosting. These results showed that standard acquisition parameters may serve to establish a reference to study this unwanted artefact without ECG and respiratory gating and using a single-channel transceiver coil.