Motion-Corrected Subspace Navigator Reconstruction for High Resolution Spiral First-pass Myocardial Perfusion Imaging at 3 Tesla

Motivation: As perfusion images are typically acquired over 60 heart beats, respiratory motion is unavoidable. Motion compromises spatio-temporal reconstructions. Goal(s): Residual undersampling artifacts and contrast variation make deformation field estimation challenging. This work aims to get an accurate deformation field from the auxiliary reconstruction and incorporate it into the forward reconstruction model to improve perfusion images. Approach: To obtain high-quality images for motion estimation, the fixed-angle spiral navigator is used to extract temporal basis. The rigid and non-rigid motion corrections are jointly incorporated into the subspace reconstruction. Results: Motion-corrected whole-heart first-pass spiral myocardial perfusion imaging with a high resolution of 1.3 mm2 is achieved. Impact: The proposed navigator-guided subspace motion correction reconstruction pipeline substantially improves the image quality, sharpness, and alignment of the 1.3mm² high-resolution spiral myocardial perfusion imaging, benefiting voxel-wise perfusion quantification crucial for assessing ischemic heart disease.