Abstract #3206

in-vivo High Resolution Diffusion Tensor Imaging of the Human Heart at 3T: Fat Suppression in the Presence of B0 Field Inhomogeneities

Jack Harmer¹, Christian T. Stoeck², Rachel W. Chan³, Nicolas Toussaint¹, Constantin Von Deuster², David Atkinson³, Sebastian Kozerke,¹²

¹Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, Kings College London, London, United Kingdom; ²Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; ³Centre for Medical Imaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom

In recent work diffusion acquisition schemes that employ stimulated echoes (STE) have been used to allow diffusion tensor imaging of the beating heart. Higher order localized image based shimming can partially compensate for the increased field inhomogeneity at high field strength but, at the same time, compromises the effectiveness of fat saturation techniques such as SPIR across the entire field-of-view. We present a dual navigated STE sequence with Slice Selective Gradient Reversal (SSGR) applied to the second and third RF pulses in order to suppress the fat signal in in-vivo data of the human heart at 3T.