Dynamic, Regularized, Adaptive Cluster Optimization (DRACO) for Free-breathing Cardiac Cine MRI in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation

Motivation: Irregular cardiac motion can degrade image quality and preclude the use of conventional segmented cine MRI for quantitative evaluation of cardiac function. And it can be difficult for some patients to do multiple breath holds. Goal(s): To evaluate a cluster-based algorithm and reconstruction approach for cine MRI in patients with atrial fibrillation under free-breathing condition. Approach: Ten atrial fibrillation patients were scanned under breath-held and free-breathing conditions. Image quality, SNR, CNR, and edge sharpness were assessed. Results: No significant difference in image quality scores, SNR, CNR, and edge sharpness were found for images obtained under breath-held and free-breathing conditions. Impact: Adaptive cluster-based motion binning with temporal total variation reconstruction is effective at handling irregular cardiac motion and enables high quality, free-breathing cine MRI in patients with atrial fibrillation.