R. Reeve Ingle1, Jolle K. Barral2, Marcus Bjrk3, Erik Gudmundson4, 5, Petre Stoica6, Dwight G. Nishimura1
1Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 2Heart Vista, Inc., Los Altos, CA, United States; 3Department of Information Technology, Systems and Control , Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; 4Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; 5Signal Processing Lab, ACCESS Linnaeus Center, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; 6Department of Information Technology, Systems and Control, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Due to the high SNR efficiency of bSSFP, estimation of T1, T2 and other parameters from phase-cycled bSSFP images seems promising at first glance. We show that the conditioning of the bSSFP signal equation is such that accurate estimation of T1 and T2 using a moderate number of phase-cycled bSSFP images requires prohibitively high SNR. We derive theoretical limits for the minimum variance of T1 and T2 estimates using the Cramr Rao Bound, and we show that the SNR required to accurately estimate T1 and T2 is higher than what is typically obtained in vivo.
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