Free Breathing Real-Time Functional Cardiac Imaging at 3 Tesla

Purpose: The accurate determination of parameters of cardiac function is of paramount importance in clinical routine. The current gold standard for the measurement of parameters such as the left ventricular (LV) end-diastolic volume (EDV), end-systolic volume (ESV) and the ejection fraction (EF) is functional cardiac MRI. However, in cases of arrhythmia or when patients cannot tolerate breath hold, it is necessary to use a free breathing single-shot real-time (ss-rt) protocol instead of segmented k-space readout. Since a temporal resolution of Tres=50ms is required to correctly estimate the end systolic volume s…