To assess gastric motility, a fast two-dimensional (2D) dynamic scan (such as turbo field echo, turbo spin echo, echo planar imaging, true FISP, balanced FFE, RARE) has been advocated [4, 5, 7, 15, 19, 20]. There is no particular preference for a specific acquisition technique, as the only goal of the technique is to be sufficiently fast to reach a temporal resolution that is high enough to analyze gastric motility with MRI. Some authors have advocated a single slice approach at the level of the stomach to assess dynamic gastric volume changes in a semi-coronal image orientation in which both parts of the antrum and part of the fundus along the longitudinal stomach axis are included (see Fig. 2) [4, 5, 15]. The following parameters have been proposed for a turbo field echo acquisition, including 300 images per scan over a time period of, for example, 5 min, a temporal resolution of 1 image per second, TE = 3.6 ms, TR = 10 ms, field of view 450 mm, rectangular field of view 55%, symmetric reduction 50%, flip angle 25°, 256/128 pixels, slice thickness 10 mm, without breath-hold.
Fig. 2 An example of a peristaltic contraction beginning at the level of the gastric fundus and propagating towards the antrum