Abstract #0084

Zuehlsdorff S, Chung Y, Wu E, Carr J, Simonetti O

Inversion recovery techniques are widely used to image infarcted myocardium. Distinction between infarcts and epicardial fat may be difficult due to short longitudinal relaxation times in both species post contrast.In this work, two methods of fat suppression in infarct imaging were examined. We compared the performance of an IR segmented turboFLASH sequence with fat saturation preparation pulse, with an IR segmented turboFLASH sequence using spectral spatial excitation pulses. The two methods were first evaluated in healthy volunteers. The better method was then tested on patients with myocardial infarction. Reliable fat suppression was achieved by using spectral spatial excitation pulses.