Free-breathing qRF-MRF with pilot tone respiratory motion navigator for T1, T2, T2*, and off-resonance mapping of the human body at 3 T.

Abstract

Standard quantitative abdominal MRI techniques are time consuming, require breath-holds, and are susceptible to patient motion artifacts. Magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF) is naturally multi-parametric and quantifies multiple tissue properties, including T₁ and T₂. This work includes T₂* and off-resonance mapping into a free-breathing MRF framework utilizing a pilot tone navigator. The new acquisition and reconstruction are compared to current clinical standards. Prospective. Ten volunteers. 3 T scanner, Quadratic-RF MRF, Balanced SSFP, Inversion recovery spin-echo, LiverLab. MRI ROIs were evaluated in the liver, spleen, pancreas, kidney (cortex and medulla), and paravertebral muscle by two abdominal imaging investigators for ten healthy adult volunteers for clinical standard, breath-Hold (BH) qRF-MRF, and free-breathing qRF-MRF with pilot-tone (PT) acquisitions. Bland-Altman analysis as well as Student's T tests were used to evaluate and compare the respective ROI analyses. Quantitative values between breath-Hold (BH) and free-breathing qRF-MRF with pilot-tone (PT) results show good agreement with clinical standard T1 and T2 quantitative mapping, and Dixon q-VIBE (acquired using the Siemens LiverLAB). In this work, we show free-breathing abdominal MRF (T₁, T₂) with T₂* results that are quantitatively comparable to current breath-hold MRF and clinical techniques.