In vivo cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) can be influenced by myocardial perfusion. To address this limitation, reference images with moderate diffusion weighting can be employed, which, however, reduce diffusion contrast and require the acquisition of three orthogonal diffusion encoding directions. In this work, blood suppression was implemented using black blood preparation to reduce contribution of perfusion to the diffusion weighted signal. This allows for the use of a marginally weighted reference image resulting in a reduction in scan time by about 17% with improved or comparable accuracy of diffusion metrics relative to previous methods.
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