Temporal stability of adaptive 3D radial MRI using multidimensional golden means

Breast tumor diagnosis requires both high spatial resolution to obtain information about tumor morphology and high temporal resolution to probe the kinetics of contrast uptake. Adaptive sampling of k‐space allows images in dynamic contrast‐enhanced (DCE)‐magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to be reconstructed at various spatial or temporal resolutions from the same dataset. However, conventional radial approaches have limited flexibility that restricts image reconstruction to predetermined resolutions. Golden‐angle radial k‐space sampling achieves flexibility in‐plane with samples that are incremented by the golden angle, which fills two‐dimensional (2D) k‐space with radial spokes that have a relatively uniform angular distribution for any time interval. We extend this method to three‐dimensional (3D) radial sampling, or 3D‐Projection Reconstruction (3D‐PR) using multidimensional golden means, which are derived from modified Fibonacci sequences by an eigenvalue approach. We quantitatively compare this technique to conventional 3D radial methods in terms of the fluctuation in error caused by undersampling artifacts, and show that the golden 3D‐PR method can substantially improve the temporal stability of quantitative measurements made from dynamic images when compared to conventional 3D radial approaches of k‐space sampling. Magn Reson Med 61:354–363, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.