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Updated: Feb 27, 2026
Assessment of Cardiac Function and Myocardial Morphology Using Small Animal Look-locker Inversion Recovery SALLI MRI in Rats
Published on: July 19, 2013
Fast, precise, and accurate myocardial T1 mapping using a radial MOLLI sequence with FLASH readout
B Marty1,2, B Coppa1,2, P G Carlier1,2
1Institute of Myology, NMR Laboratory, Paris, France.
Purpose:
Quantitative cardiac MRI, and more particularly T1 mapping, has become a most important modality to characterize myocardial tissue. In this work, the value of a radial variant of the conventional modified Look-Locker inversion recovery sequence (raMOLLI) is demonstrated.
Methods:
The raMOLLI acquisition scheme consisted of five radial echo trains of 80 spokes acquired using either a fast low-angle shot (FLASH) or a true fast imaging with steady-state-precession (TrueFISP) readout at different time points after a single magnetization inversion. View sharing combined with a compressed sensing algorithm allowed the reconstruction of 50 images along the T1 relaxation recovery curve, to which a dictionary-fitting approach was applied to estimate T1 . The sequence was validated on a nine-vial phantom, on 19 healthy subjects, and one patient suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy.
Results:
The raMOLLI sequence allowed a significant decrease of myocardial T1 map acquisition time down to five heartbeats, while exhibiting a higher degree of accuracy and a comparable precision on T1 value estimation than the conventional modified Look-Locker inversion recovery sequence. The FLASH readout demonstrated a better robustness to B0 inhomogeneities than TrueFISP, and was therefore preferred for in vivo acquisitions.
Conclusions:
This sequence represents a good candidate for ultrafast acquisition of myocardial T1 maps. Magn Reson Med 79:1387-1398, 2018. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
