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Updated: Jun 16, 2025
Assessment of Cardiac Function and Myocardial Morphology Using Small Animal Look-locker Inversion Recovery SALLI MRI in Rats
Published on: July 19, 2013
Fast cardiac T1ρ,adiab mapping using slice-selective adiabatic spin-lock preparation pulses
Andrew Tyler1, Karl Kunze1,2, Radhouene Neji1
1School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King's College London, London, UK.
Purpose:
Myocardial T1ρ mapping techniques commonly acquire multiple images in one breathhold to calculate a single-slice T1ρ map. Recently, non-selective adiabatic pulses have been used for robust spin-lock preparation (T1ρ,adiab). The objective of this study was to develop a fast multi-slice myocardial T1ρ,adiab mapping approach.
Methods:
The proposed-sequence reduces the number of breathholds required for whole-heart 2D T1ρ,adiab mapping by acquiring multiple interleaved slices in each breathhold using slice-selective T1ρ,adiab preparation pulses. The proposed-sequence was implemented with two interleaved slices per breathhold scan and was quantitatively evaluated in phantom experiments and 10 healthy-volunteers against a single-slice T1ρ,adiab mapping sequence. The sequence was demonstrated in two patients with myocardial scar.
Results:
The phantom experiments showed the proposed-sequence had slice-to-slice variation of 1.62% ± 1.05% and precision of 4.51 ± 0.68 ms. The healthy volunteer cohort subject-wise mean relaxation time was lower for the proposed-sequence than the single-slice sequence (137.7 ± 5.3 ms vs. 148.4 ± 8.3 ms, p < 0.001), and spatial-standard-deviation was better (18.7 ± 1.8 ms vs. 21.8 ± 3.4 ms, p < 0.018). The mean within-subject, coefficient of variation was 5.93% ± 1.57% for the proposed-sequence and 6.31% ± 1.92% for the single-slice sequence (p = 0.35) and the effect of slice variation (0.81 ± 4.87 ms) was not significantly different to zero (p = 0.61). In both patient examples increased T1ρ,adiab (maximum American Heart Association-segment mean = 174 and 197 ms) was measured within the myocardial scar.
Conclusion:
The proposed sequence provides a twofold acceleration for myocardial T1ρ,adiab mapping using a multi-slice approach. It has no significant difference in within-subject variability, and significantly better precision, compared to a 2D T1ρ,adiab mapping sequence based on non-selective adiabatic spin-lock preparations.
