Figure 2

MOCCA respiratory self-gating. Stacked MOCCA echoes acquired prior to each cardiac phase are compared to a reference echo by calculating the correlation coefficient (CC). The reference, which corresponds to an echo acquired at the end-expiration, is calculated as follows: the average of the cross-correlation between the MOCCA-echo in each heat-beat with the corresponding echo acquired in all remaining heart-beats is calculated. The MOCCA-echo with the maximum calculated average corresponds to the end-expiration respiratory cycle, and is selected as the MOCCA-echo reference. Subsequently, in self-gating step, for each imaging segment, the acquired data following the MOCCA-echo with highest correlation coefficient among four acquisitions is included in the final respiratory self-gated cine image. MOCCA-reference calculation and data selection among four averages as described above is repeated for each cardiac phase.