Feasibility of endocardial edge detection by using an inversion recovery artifact

An inversion recovery (IR) artifact was used to delineate the blood/wall boundary in left ventricles. The artifact consisted of a hypointensity signal in pixels located at the boundary of two contiguous tissues with different T(1) relaxation times. The feasibility of measuring the ejection fraction using the artifact was tested in ten healthy volunteers, with two IR snapshot-FLASH sequences possessing different times of repetition (TR = 11msec and TR = 3.5msec) and appropriate times of inversion. The comparison with a cine-MRI sequence showed that ejection fraction measurements are feasible when performed with a snapshot-FLASH sequence that has a sufficiently short TR (3.5msec).