Andrew David Scott1,2, Sonia Nielles-Vallespin1,3, Pedro Ferreira1,2, Peter Gatehouse1,2, Zohya Khalique1, Philip Kilner1,2, Dudley Pennell1,2, and David Firmin1,2
1Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit, Royal Brompton and Harefield Foundation NHS Trust, London, United Kingdom, 2National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, 3National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States
In-vivo cardiac diffusion tensor imaging
(cDTI) performed with a stimulated echo (STEAM) sequence is considered strain
sensitive and low SNR. Alternatively, motion compensated spin-echo (M012-SE)
sequences are thought to be strain insensitive and high SNR, but suffer from
long echo times and short mixing times.
In this work we compare the reliability of and the cDTI parameters
derived from STEAM and M012-SE data in 20 volunteers at mutliple points in the
cardiac cycle on a standard clinical scanner.
We show systematic differences between the sequences and show that there
are few correlations between these differences and strain and/or T1/T2.