2-DIMENSIONAL MULTISHOT ECHO-PLANAR CORONARY MR-ANGIOGRAPHY

This work presents a two-dimensional (2D) multishot echo-planar imagin g (EPI) technique for magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) of individu al coronary arteries in a 17-heart-beat breath-hold. Conventional 2D a nd 3D segmented gradient-echo (GRE) coronary MRA requires repetitive e xcitation of the same slice or slab within each cardiac cycle, which c an result in reduced blood signal and in motion artifacts. Two-dimensi onal multishot EPI can address these limitations by eliminating multip le excitations per cardiac cycle, using large flip-angle excitations, markedly reducing the data acquisition window, and performing oblique multislice 2D imaging. The goal of this study was to assess the feasib ility of breath-hold 2D multishot EPI for multislice coronary MRA and to demonstrate its reliability by consistently acquiring high-quality images of the coronary arteries in a series of 16 volunteers.