A unifying model of perfusion and motion applied to reconstruction of sparsely sampled free-breathing myocardial perfusion MRI

The clinical potential of dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is currently limited by respiratory induced motion of the heart. This paper presents a unifying model of perfusion and motion in which respiratory motion becomes an integral part of myocardial perfusion quantification. Hence, the need for tedious manual motion correction prior to perfusion quantification is avoided. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed framework facilitates the process of reconstructing DCE-MRI from sparsely sampled data in the presence of respiratory motion. The paper focuses primarily on the underlying theory of the proposed framework, but shows in vivo results of respiratory motion correction and simulation results of reconstructing sparsely sampled data.