Assessment of Left Ventricular Function and Mass on Free-Breathing Compressed Sensing Real-Time Cine Imaging

Background: Compressed sensing (CS) cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has the advantage of being inherently insensitive to respiratory motion. This study compared the accuracy of free-breathing (FB) CS and breath-hold (BH) standard cine MRI for left ventricular (LV) volume assessment. Methods and Results: Sixty-three patients underwent cine MRI with both techniques. Both types of images were acquired in stacks of 8 short-axis slices (temporal/spatial resolution, 41 ms/1.7x1.7x6 mm3) and compared for ejection fraction, end-diastolic and systolic volumes, stroke volume, and LV mass. Both BH standard and FB CS cine MRI provided acceptable image quality for LV volumetric analysis (score = 3) in all patients (4.7 +/- 0.5 and 3.7 +/- 0.5, respectively; P< 0.0001) and had good agreement on LV functional assessment. LV mass, however, was slightly underestimated on FB CS cine MRI (median, IQR: BH standard, 83.8 mL, 64.7-102.7 mL; FB CS, 79.0 mL, 66.0-101.0 mL; P= 0.0006). The total acquisition times for BH standard and FB CS cine MRI were 113 +/- 7 s and 24 +/- 4 s, respectively (P< 0.0001). Conclusions: Despite underestimation of LV mass, FB CS cine MRI is a clinically useful alternative to BH standard cine MRI in patients with impaired BH capacity.