Cardiac imaging: comparison of two-shot echo-planar imaging with fast segmented K-space and conventional gradient-echo cine acquisitions.

We compared the cardiac image quality of multishot echo-planar imaging (EPI), segmented K-space, and conventional cine acquisitions. Three techniques were used to obtain gated multiphase acquisitions of an axial section traversing both ventricles in 10 volunteers: two-shot EPI acquired nonsequentially over two heart beats breath-held; segmented K-space cine with eight K-space lines acquired per cardiac trigger over 16 R-R intervals, also breath-held; and 24 cine phases obtained over 256 R-R intervals. Intraventricular SNRs with two-shot EPI were superior to segmented K-space cine acquisitions (P < .005) and not statistically different from conventional cine acquisitions (P < .1). Intraventricular signal was most homogeneous on conventional cine images (P < .05). Coronary artery visualization and myocardial delineation were better on the EPI image set than on segmented K-space cine images (P < .05). Two-shot EPI provides high-quality gated cardiac images with an acquisition time of only 2 seconds.