Dynamic contrast-enhanced MR imaging has long been an attractive alternative to measure pulmonary perfusion as it offers simultaneous acquisition of high-resolution anatomical images and various functional information without exposing to ionizing radiation. As higher temporal resolution in addition to simultaneous acquisition of more slices from different positions favors more precise diagnosis, rapid acquisition of multiple images during bolus contrast administration remains essential to pulmonary perfusion imaging. Nevertheless, the branching morphology together with asynchronization of contrast-enhanced pulmonary perfusion scattered among distinct blood vessels imposes difficulties to faster imaging. This work demonstrates that k-t broad-use linear acquisition speed-up technique (k-t BLAST), having substantial performance on accelerating cardiac cine imaging, can be applied to accelerate dynamic contrast-enhanced lung imaging up to a factor of 5 with errors less than 6% on five healthy subjects and less than 10% on 13 patients, respectively, in the overall signal intensity. Perfusion parameter estimates show somewhat less errors than those in overall signal intensity. Results from healthy subjects and two groups of patients with various diseases show high consistency between fully sampled datasets and their accelerated counterparts. These suggest feasibility of accelerated contrast-enhanced lung images in clinical examinations and potential of extending k-t BLAST into related applications.
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