Glenn S. Slavin1, Maureen N. Hood2, Vincent B. Ho2, Jeffrey A. Stainsby3
1GE Healthcare, Bethesda, MD, United States; 2Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, MD, United States; 3GE Healthcare, Toronto, ON, Canada
The challenge for cardiac T1 mapping is obtaining sufficient sampling of the T1 relaxation curve in a single breath-hold. Traditional single-point inversion recovery is limited by short delay times and is not feasible in a breath-hold. Multi-point (Look-Locker) inversion recovery is possible in a breath-hold; however, it necessitates both partial Fourier and parallel imaging and long data acquisition windows. Look-Locker imaging also measures apparent relaxation times (T1*), rather than true T1. This work demonstrates a cardiac T1 mapping method that measures true T1 in a single breath-hold using multiple single-point saturation recovery with delay times longer than the cardiac cycle.