Acceleration of tissue phase mapping with sensitivity encoding at 3T.

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Medical Physics
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Cardiac motion assessment using black blood cine tissue phase mapping (TPM) is crucial for quantitative analysis.
• Long acquisition times limit whole-heart coverage in TPM.
• Increased imaging speed is needed without compromising quantitative motion data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effect of Sensitivity Encoding (SENSE) on quantitative cardiac motion assessment in black blood cine TPM.
• To determine the feasibility of accelerating TPM acquisition using SENSE.

Main Methods:

• Twenty healthy volunteers underwent myocardial short-axis TPM scans.
• Scans were performed with varying SENSE acceleration factors.
• The impact of SENSE acceleration on measured cardiac motion curves was analyzed.

Main Results:

• TPM sequences accelerated with SENSE showed minimal impact on motion curves.
• A SENSE factor of 4 resulted in less than a 3% decrease in motion curve amplitude.
• No significant differences were found in correlation or deviation between SENSE-accelerated and reproducible measurements.

Conclusions:

• Myocardial TPM measurements can be accelerated using SENSE factors up to 4.
• Substantial cardiac motion information is retained even with accelerated SENSE factors.
• SENSE-based acceleration is feasible for faster TPM acquisition.