Wen-Chau Wu1, Jiongjiong Wang2
1Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 2Radiology and Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Conventional T1 measurement is time-consuming as the longitudinal relaxation curve is sampled with varied inversion times in separate scans. TrueFISP is a balanced SSFP technique characterized by high imaging speed while preserving a high signal-to-noise ratio. We observed that blood pool signals in inversion-recovery (IR) prepared TrueFISP acquisitions generally follow the conventional T1 recovery model due to the replenishment of blood spins with longitudinal magnetization unperturbed by the TrueFISP pulse train. By conducting experiments and computer simulations, we demonstrated the feasibility of using multi-phase IR-TrueFISP for fast (< 1 min) and reliable (2% repeatability) in-vivo blood T1 mapping.