Three-dimensional pulmonary perfusion MRI with radial ultrashort echo time and spatial-temporal constrained reconstruction

Purpose To assess the feasibility of spatial–temporal constrained reconstruction for accelerated regional lung perfusion using highly undersampled dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) three-dimensional (3D) radial MRI with ultrashort echo time (UTE). Methods A combined strategy was used to accelerate DCE MRI for 3D pulmonary perfusion with whole lung coverage. A highly undersampled 3D radial UTE MRI acquisition was combined with an iterative constrained reconstruction exploiting principal component analysis and wavelet soft-thresholding for dimensionality reduction in space and time. The performance of the method was evaluated using a 3D fractal-based DCE digital lung phantom. Simulated perfusion maps and contrast enhancement curves were compared with ground truth using the structural similarity index (SSIM) to determine robust threshold and regularization levels. Feasibility studies were then performed in a canine and a human subject with 3D radial UTE (TE = 0.08 ms) acquisition to assess feasibility of mapping regional 3D perfusion. Results The method was able to accurately recover perfusion maps in the phantom with a nominal isotropic spatial resolution of 1.5 mm (SSIM of 0.949). The canine and human subject studies demonstrated feasibility for providing artifact-free perfusion maps in a simple 3D breath-held acquisition. Conclusion The proposed method is promising for fast and flexible 3D pulmonary perfusion imaging. Magn Reson Med 73:555–564, 2015. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.