Abstract #1216

Pai V

While myocardial tagging is an established approach for evaluating cardiac wall function, its practical application has been hindered by various issues. Some of the difficulties have included segmenting of epicardial and endocardial contours, and loss of information from early systolic phases when SSFP-based sequences are used. We present a partial tagging approach which may be useful in alleviating these problems. In this approach, a multi-echo SSFP tagging sequence is acquired in such a way that the central k-space region is untagged. This provides untagged and tagged cine datasets simultaneously, and eliminates transition artifacts typically observed in early systolic phases.