Rosette Cardiac MR Fingerprinting for Simultaneous T₁, T₂, T 2 * , and Fat Fraction Mapping Using a Multi-Echo Deep...

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Medical Physics
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Quantitative mapping of cardiac tissue properties is crucial for diagnosing and monitoring various heart conditions.
• Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (cMRF) offers rapid, simultaneous multi-parameter quantification from a single scan.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a multi-echo cMRF acquisition combined with a deep image prior (DIP) framework.
• To reconstruct simultaneous cardiac T1, T2, T2*, and fat fraction maps.

Main Methods:

• A 2D, single-breathhold, ECG-gated rosette trajectory cMRF sequence was used.
• Data were processed using a DIP reconstruction trained with the cMRF encoding model.
• T1, T2, T2*, and fat fraction maps were generated via curve fitting and pattern matching.

Main Results:

• The technique showed good agreement with gold-standard measurements in phantoms.
• In healthy subjects, DIP reconstruction measurements aligned with clinical cardiac measurements.
• DIP reconstruction demonstrated lower voxel-level variance compared to other methods in healthy subjects.

Conclusions:

• Multi-echo cMRF with DIP reconstruction enables simultaneous quantification of key cardiac parameters (T1, T2, T2*, fat).
• The method shows good agreement with conventional mapping techniques in phantom and in vivo studies.
• DIP reconstruction offers improved accuracy and reduced variance over direct gridding and iterative low-rank methods.