Free-Breathing Liver Fat, R2* and B0 Field Mapping Using Multi-Echo Radial FLASH and Regularized Model-Based Reconstruction

This work introduced a stack-of-radial multi echo asymmetric-echo MRI sequence for free-breathing liver volumetric acquisition. Regularized model-based reconstruction was implemented in Berkeley Advanced Reconstruction Toolbox (BART) to jointly estimate all physical parameter maps (water, fat, R-2(*), and B-0 field inhomogeneity maps) and coil sensitivity maps from self-gated k-space data. Specifically, locally low rank and temporal total variation regularization were employed directly on physical parameter maps. The proposed free-breathing radial technique was tested on a water/fat & iron phantom, a young volunteer, and obesity/diabetes/hepatic steatosis patients. Quantitative fat fraction and R-2(*) accuracy were confirmed by comparing our technique with the reference breath-hold Cartesian scan. The multi-echo radial sampling sequence achieves fast k-space coverage and is robust to motion. Moreover, the proposed motion-resolved model based reconstruction allows for free-breathing liver fat and R-2(*) quantification in multiple motion states. Overall, our proposed technique offers a convenient tool for non-invasive liver assessment with no breath holding requirement.