Cine DENSE for Assessment of Diastolic Function: Pulse Sequence Development and Initial Results.

Bhairav Bipin Mehta¹, Andrew D. Gilliam², Frederick H. Epstein¹, ³, Michael Salerno, ³⁴

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HF-PEF) resulting primarily from diastolic dysfunction accounts for more than half of all heart failure cases. Echocardiography is commonly used to assess diastolic function but has limitations affecting its measurement accuracy. Strain and strain rate measurement using cine DENSE MRI has advantages over echocardiographic techniques and could improve the diagnosis of diastolic dysfunction. Previous cine DENSE sequences have primarily imaged systole. With these sequences, SNR has degraded by mid-diastole, yielding inaccurate displacement measurements and strains. Here we modified a systolic cine DENSE sequence to image diastole with sufficient SNR to compute accurate diastolic displacements, strains, and strain rates.