Myocardium Tissue DTI with Stimulated Echo at Large Susceptibility Induced B0 gradients: Examination of the Shimming Strategies Efficiency and Errors.

In this paper, we investigated experimentally and statistically the effect of distortions of myocardium DTI with STEAM-EPI due to susceptibility induced gradients varied in a range of factor 10 to 20 to the reference. The special focus was given to examining the effect of prolonged EPI-readout, B₀-shimming effect and motion-induced shimming errors relevant for high-resolution DTI in-vivo. Fresh ex-vivo pig hearts were used for DTI measurements with an in-house developed STEAM-EPI sequence. The distribution of diffusion directions components was found well preserved for prolonged readout even at high internal gradient.