Comparison of DENSE Reference Strategies

Henrik Haraldsson¹, Andreas Sigfridsson², Hajime Sakuma², Tino Ebbers¹

Displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) has been used to acquire non-invasive in-vivo displacement maps of the beating heart. A phase reference is required to compensate for magnetic field inhomogeneities, but the strategy used to acquire it may influence the data quality. We have compared displacement accuracy, in-vivo and in-vitro, for three relevant phase reference strategies and found that a symmetric reference approach was superior in terms of standard deviation, influence of chemical shift, displacement offset and black blood effect.