Accelerated-x4 Balanced-SSFP Cardiac Cine 2D/3D DENSE with Phase-Cycled Encoding for Improved Performance

Cine frame-rate quantification of myocardial strain has been previously demonstrated with 2D echo-planar and 2D/3D spiral sequence versions of Displacement Encoding with Stimulated Echoes (DENSE). While these non-conventional methods allow fast-acquisition, they are plagued with off-resonance limitations that has hindered their integration into mainstream cardiac MRI application. Here we present a more conventional, accelerated-x4, balanced SSFP (bSSFP) version of Cardiac Cine 2D/3D DENSE with improved phase-cycled encoding for effective artifact suppression. In vivo human scans at 3T demonstrated good agreement of myocardial radial (Err), circumferential (Ecc) and longitudinal (Ell) strains as reported in previous literature along with lower artifact degradation compared to standard complementary-encoded DENSE.