Free-breathing contrast-enhanced multiphase MRI of the liver in patients with a high risk of breath-holding failure: comparison of compressed sensing-accelerated radial and Cartesian acquisition techniques

Background: Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of each magnetic resonance (MR) technique, would allow us to choose a sequence better suited in patients with a high risk of breath-holding failure. Purpose: To compare the image quality of free-breathing contrast-enhanced multiphase MR imaging (MRI) using incoherent Cartesian k-space sampling combined with a motion-resolved compressed sensing reconstruction (XD-VIBE) and Golden-Angle Radial Sparse Parallel MRI (GRASP). Material and Methods: A total of 67 patients were included. Overall image quality, motion artifacts, and liver edge sharpness on arterial and portal-venous phase were evaluated by two radiologists. We evaluated the signal intensity ratio between liver in the late arterial phase to aorta at peak enhancement and the detection rate of hypervascular lesions. Results: Overall image quality, artifact, and liver edge sharpness scores of XD-VIBE and GRASP were not significantly different (P = 0.070–0.397). Four (reviewer 1, 12.1%) and seven patients (reviewer 2, 21.2%) received non-diagnostic quality in the XD-VIBE group whereas one patient (reviewer 2, 2.9%) received non-diagnostic quality in the GRASP group. The ratio between the aorta and liver signal for GRASP was significantly higher than that of XD-VIBE (0.32 ± 0.10 vs. 0.47 ± 0.13; P < 0.001). The hypervascular lesion detection rate of XD-VIBE (86.7%) was higher than that of GRASP (57.1%) in the arterial phase without a statistically significant difference (P = 0.081). Conclusion: Overall image quality of XD-VIBE and GRASP were not significantly different. More XD-VIBE examinations were rated non-diagnostic. On the other hand, the relative liver parenchymal enhancement to the aorta in the late arterial phase of GRASP was higher than that of XD-VIBE, which potentially leads to lower detectability of hypervascular lesions on arterial phase images.