Fluorine-19 (19F) MRI of injected perfluorocarbon emulsions (PFCs) allows for the non-invasive quantification of inflammation and cell tracking, but suffers from a low signal-to-noise ratio and extended scan time. To address this limitation, we tested the hypothesis that a 19F MRI pulse sequence that combines a specific undersampling regime with signal averaging has increased sensitivity and robustness against motion artifacts compared to a non-averaged fully-sampled dataset, when both are reconstructed with compressed sensing. To this end, numerical simulations and phantom experiments were performed to characterize the point spread function (PSF) of undersampling patterns and the vulnerability to noise of acquisition-reconstruction strategies with paired numbers of x signal averages and acceleration factor x (NAx-AFx). At all investigated noise levels, the DSC of the acquisition-reconstruction strategies strongly depended on the regularization parameters and acceleration factor. In phantoms, motion robustness of an NA8-AF8 undersampling pattern versus NA1-AF1 was evaluated with simulated and real motions. Differences were assessed with Dice similarity coefficients (DSC), and were consistently higher for NA8-AF8 compared to NA1-AF1 strategy, for both simulated and real cyclic motions (P<0.001). Both acquisition-reconstruction strategies were validated in vivo in mice (n=2) injected with perfluoropolyether. These images displayed a sharper delineation of the liver with the NA8-AF8 strategy than with the NA1-AF1 strategy. In conclusion, we validated the hypothesis that in 19F MRI, the combination of undersampling and averaging improves both the sensitivity and the robustness against motion artifacts compared to a non-averaged fully-sampled dataset, when both are reconstructed with compressed sensing.
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