Highly accelerated imaging of cardiac function using a 32 channel cardiac phased array at 3 T

Standard clinical cardiac sequences are often exhausting for patients with cardiovascular disease due to the requirement for breath-hold times. A common approach to speed up the imaging process is the use of parallel imaging techniques and thus the prospect to reduce or even eliminate the breath-hold times. Recently presented dedicated 32 channel cardiac arrays for 1.5T have shown the feasibility of very high acceleration factors. The trade-off for these high acceleration factors is a loss in SNR. The intrinsically higher SNR of 3T can compensate for this loss to a certain extend. In this work we want to present…