Coronary artery imaging in multiple 1-sec breath holds.

The act of breathing results in considerable bulk cardiac motion, thus breath holding is usually required to image the coronary arteries. Normally, breath hold periods of about 15 sec are required, which can be difficult to sustain over several minutes. We introduce a breath holding strategy that only requires a 1-sec breath hold in every 4 sec. A set of cross-sectional images is acquired in approximately 10 min, and 3-dimensional renderings of the coronary tree are produced from these.