The Effect of K-Space Trajectory on Strain-Encoded Cardiac MRI

Elsayed H. Ibrahim¹, Wolfgang Rehwald², Sven Zuehlsdorff², Richard D. White¹

Strain encoding (SENC) is a newly-developed MRI technique for measuring myocardial strain in the through-plane direction. It requires simple post-processing and gives resolution on the pixel level. With conventional SENC sequence, two separate scans are required to obtain the strain images. Such approach increases scan time and could result in image misregistration in post-processing. Non-Cartesian k-space trajectories are becoming more popular because they allow for large undersampling with acceptable image quality. In this work, SENC was combined with radial k-space acquisition using interleaved SENC tunings and radial undersampling. Scan time was reduced to one breath-hold with comparable image quality.