Abstract #0149

Sack I, Rump J, Papazoglou S, Klatt D, Hamhaber U, Braun J

The assessment of myocardial stiffness could be important for detecting early states of heart diseases and predicting the development of heart insufficiency. Here, first successful in vivo MR Elastography (MRE) experiments on the human heart are presented. A new sequence design in steady-state free precession MRE enabled us to combine a low-frequency shear-wave excitation of the interventricular septum with fast motion sensitization and short MR-repetition times. Initial results on three healthy volunteers indicate the presence of two independent shear moduli (16 8 kPa and 2.25 1.8 kPa) similarly to the anisotropy of the elasticity observed in skeletal muscle.