Temporal 3D Lagrangian strain from 2D slice-followed cine DENSE MRI

A quantitative analysis of myocardial mechanics is fundamental to the understanding of cardiac function, diagnosis of heart disease and assessment of therapeutic intervention. In clinical practice, most cardiac imaging analyses are performed in 2D because of the limited scan time available. However, the obtained information from a 2D measurement is limited. This study presents a method to obtain temporal evolutions of transmural 3D Lagrangian strains from two intersecting 2D planes of slice-followed cine displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) data using a bilinear-cubic polynomial element to resolve strain from the displaced myocardial positions. The method was validated against an analytical standard and has been applied to in vivo data acquired on a 3 T magnetic resonance system from a healthy volunteer to quantify systolic strains at the anterior-basal region of left ventricular myocardium. The method demonstrates accurate results when validated in the analytical model, and the in vivo results agree within experimental accuracy with values reported in the literature. Even with a short scan time, this method provides the full 3D Lagrangian strain tensor from two 2D DENSE measurements.