Characterising an Inversion-Recovery Prepared Steady-State Free-Precession Sequence for Measuring Myocardial T1 Relaxation Times Pre- And Post-Contrast Administration.

R Stephen Nicholas¹, ², Stephen J. Gandy¹, ², J Graeme Houston³, ⁴

This work characterised an Inversion Recovery prepared SSFP used for determining the optimum Inversion Time (TI) in the myocardium after contrast administration. Gel phantoms with known T1 and T2 values were scanned with different simulated heart rates to measure the variation in the optimum TI. The results showed that there is considerable variation in TI. These results were applied in a small cohort of patients to account for heart rate variability in T1 measurements for both pre-and post-contrast TI measurements in normal and hyper-enhanced myocardium. However, significant variability was still observed, particularly in the pre-contrast measurements.