Cardiac dark-blood T2 mapping increases effective myocardial thickness by 35-75% for T2 evaluation in healthy subjects and patients

Cardiac dark-blood T2 mapping is an emerging technique to measure myocardial T2 with simultaneous suppression of blood pool and pericardial fat. In this work, we compared dark-blood T2 mapping with conventional bright-blood T2 mapping in terms of accuracy, precision, and effective myocardial thickness, in 8 healthy subjects and 7 patients. We found similar accuracy and precision between the two T2 mapping methods, but a largely improved effective myocardial thickness with dark-blood T2 mapping, due to reduced partial-voluming. The increased thickness may improve the accuracy of T2 in thin-walled structures for clinical evaluation.