Enhancing bSSFP cine imaging in cardiac device patients with twofold phase cycling and cross-attention transformer network

Motivation: Patients with cardiovascular implantable electronic devices (CIED) experience significant off-resonance using bSSFP imaging, leading to artifacts that hinder accurate analysis of cardiac function. Goal(s): To enhance bSSFP cine imaging for patients with cardiac implants at 3T by employing a twofold phase cycling and cross-attention transformer network. Approach: We developed a cross-attention transformer network to process two phase-cycled images and produce artifact-suppressed output. This method was evaluated on 9 healthy subjects with an extracorporeal cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) positioned at the left chest. Results: Our method reduced off-resonance artifacts, thereby enhancing the quality of bSSFP images. Impact: Our method considerably increases the feasibility of bSSFP imaging in CIED patients at high fields.