Single breath-hold EPI-based 3D Late Gadolinium Enhancement Imaging

Motivation: 3D Late Gadolinium Enhanced MRI can suffer from long scan times which can be difficult for some patients to tolerate. Goal(s): Design a 3D single breath-hold LGE-MRI sequence able to acquire whole-heart LGE images. Approach: Implement an inversion recovery-prepared segmented 3D EPI sequence with a blipped-CAIPI undersampling pattern and an iterative SENSE reconstruction. Results: Two patients were scanned with the proposed sequence, demonstrating that 3D whole-heart LGE images can be reconstructed from data acquired during a single, 19 heartbeat breath-hold, with a total undersampling factor of 4. Impact: Using EPI readouts for LGE-MRI allows 3D images to be acquired in one breath-hold, with less undersampling than previously proposed methods. Further developments to the reconstruction could improve the resolution, to match what can be realised in longer, free-breathing acquisitions.