Improving Temporal Fidelity in k-t BLAST MRI Reconstruction

Studies of myocardial motion using magnetic resonance imaging usually require multiple breath holds and several methods have been proposed in order to reduce the scan time. Rapid imaging using k-t BLAST has gained much attention with its high reduction factors and image quality. Temporal smoothing, however, may reduce the accuracy when assessing cardiac function. In the present work, a modified reconstruction filter is proposed, that preserves more of the high temporal frequencies. Artificial decimation of a fully sampled data set was used to evaluate the reconstruction filter. Compared to the conventional k-t BLAST reconstruction, the modified filter produced images with sharper temporal delineation of the myocardial walls. Quantitative analysis by means of regional velocity estimation showed that the modified reconstruction filter produced more accurate velocity estimations.