Ting Song1, Maureen N. Hood2, Vincent B. Ho3, Sandeep N. Gupta4, Jeffrey A. Stainsby5
1Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Bethesda, MD, USA; 2Radiology, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, MD, USA; 3Radiology, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Bethesda, MD; 4GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY, USA; 5Applied Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Toronto, ON, Canada
Cardiac T1 mapping is a challenging problem given cardiac motion and respiratory motion. A modified look-locker saturation-recovery (MLLSR) sequence was evaluated on both phantoms and human studies in this paper. Saturation recovery has benefits over inversion recovery methods in quantification of T1 as it obviates the need for dummy heartbeats used for relaxation to equilibrium, and fitting of the data is not confounded by the phase of the MR signal. The MLLSR T1-mapping sequence is shown to be robust for cardiac applications across a range of flip angles and heart rates, across a wide range of T1 relaxation times.