CARDIAC IMAGING - COMPARISON OF 2-SHOT ECHO-PLANAR IMAGING WITH FAST SEGMENTED K-SPACE AND CONVENTIONAL GRADIENT-ECHO CINE ACQUISITIONS

We compared the cardiac image quality of multishot echo-planar imaging (EPI), segmented Ii-space, and conventional cine acquisitions. Three techniques were used to obtain gated multiphase acquisitions of an axi al section traversing both ventricles in 10 volunteers: two-shot EPI a cquired nonsequentially over two heart beats breath-held; segmented Ii -space cine with eight K-space lines acquired per cardiac trigger over 16 R-R intervals, also breath-held; and 24 cine phases obtained over 256 R-R intervals. Intraventricular SNRs with two-shot EPI were superi or to segmented Ii-space cine acquisitions (P < .005) and not statisti cally different from conventional cine acquisitions (P < .1). Intraven tricular signal was most homogeneous on conventional cine images (P < .05). Coronary artery visualization and myocardial delineation were be tter on the EPI image set than on segmented li-space cine images (p < .05). Two-shot EPI provides high-quality gated cardiac images with an acquisition time of only 2 seconds.