Original contributions Retrospectively gated cardiac cine imaging with temporal and spatial acceleration

Parallel imaging methods are routinely used to accelerate the image acquisition process in cardiac cine imaging. The addition of a temporal accelerationmethod,wherebyk-spaceissampleddifferentlyfordifferenttimeframes,hasbeenshowninpriorworktoimproveimagequalityas comparedtoparallelimagingbyitself.However,suchtemporalaccelerationstrategiesprovedifficulttocombinewithretrospectivelygatedcine imaging. The only currently published method to feature such combination, by Hansen et al. [Magn Reson Med 55 (2006) 85–91] tends to be associatedwithprohibitivelylongreconstructiontimes. Thegoalofthepresentworkwasto developaretrospectively gatedcardiaccinemethod that features both parallel imaging and temporal acceleration, capable of achieving significant acceleration factors on commonly available hardware and associated with reconstruction times short enough for practical use in a clinical context. Seven cardiac patients and a healthy volunteer were recruited and imaged, with acceleration factors of 3.5 or 4.5, using an eight-channel product cardiac array on a 1.5-T system. The prescribed FOV value proved slightly too small in three patients, and one of the patients had a bigemini condition. Despite these additional challenges, good-quality results were obtained for all slices and all patients, with a reconstruction time of 0.98±0.07 s per frame, or about 20 s for a 20-frame slice, using a single processor on a single PC. As compared to