Human Cardiac T1 Measured At 7 Tesla

Christopher Thomas Rodgers^1,2, Stefan Piechnik¹, Lance DelaBarre², Pierre-Francois Van de Moortele², Carl Snyder², Stefan Neubauer¹, Matthew D. Robson¹, J. Thomas Vaughan²

Cardiac MRI at 7T is an emerging field. So far, volume and function have been measured. Our aim here is to extend the repertoire of 7T cardiac MRI to inversion recovery experiments. We produce an inversion pulse in the heart and use it to measure myocardial T₁ at 7T with a modified version of the ShMOLLI Look-Locker inversion recovery experiment. Using a 10ms HS8 adiabatic inversion pulse with peak power 12.8kW, and FLASH imaging we find T₁ values of 1405ms (50) at 7T compared to 980ms at 1.5T, and 1198ms at 3T. We discuss the remaining limitations at 7T.