Dynamic 3D MR-Defecography

Abstract

Epidemiological studies have estimated the incidence of chronic constipation to be up to 27 % of the general population. The gold standard to evaluate affected patients is the dynamic entero-colpo-cysto-defecography. In the clinical routine 2 D MR-defecography is also performed, but only one to three 2 D slices at a temporal footprint of about one second are acquired. To improve the detection of lateral localized pathologies, we developed and implemented dynamic 3 D MR-defecography. Each 3 D block consisted of seven slices with an in-plane spatial resolution of 1.3 × 1.3mm² to 2.3 × 2.3mm² and an image update rate between 0.8 s and 1.3 s. We used a fast bSSFP sequence with a modified stack-of-stars sampling scheme for data acquisition and a modified FISTA compressed sensing algorithm to reconstruct the undersampled datasets. We performed a study including 6 patients to optimize the acquisition parameters with respect to image quality.