Michelle Fitts1,
2, Elodie Breton3, Eugene G. Kholmovski, 24,
Derek J. Dosdall2, 5, Sathya Vijayakumar, 24,
Kyung P. Hong1, 2, Ravi Ranjan2, 5,
Nassir F. Marrouche2, 5, Leon Axel6, Daniel
Kim2, 4
1Bioengineering,
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States; 2CARMA
Center, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States; 3ICube,
Strasbourg University, Strasbourg, Alsance, France; 4UCAIR,
Department of Radiology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United
States; 5Internal Medicine, University of Utah, Salt Lake City,
UT, United States; 6Department of Radiology, New York University,
New York, United States
We propose an arrhythmia-insensitive, rapid (AIR) cardiac T1 mapping pulse sequence based on saturation recovery, which is insensitive to heart rate and rhythm conditions, for quantification of diffuse fibrosis. We compared its performance against the conventional cardiac T1 mapping inversion recovery based method, MOLLI, which is sensitive to heart rate and rhythm conditions and requires a long breath-hold duration. In vivo studies demonstrated that T1 measurements made by MOLLI and AIR were strongly correlated, but in poor agreement. Our AIR pulse sequence may be clinically useful for assessment of diffuse myocardial fibrosis in patients.