Improving Cardiac Phase-Resolved T2*-Mapping of the Murine Heart: Artifact Reduction and Enhanced Accuracy

Motivation: Rapid blood flow in mice heart imposes severe phase shift error in k-space data, resulting ghosting artifact in the image. These artifacts notably affect the accuracy of myocardial T2* relaxometry, as they introduce variable ghosting artifacts into echo images. Goal(s): To investigate the effect of Flow Compensation (FC) on myocardial T2*-map acquired by retrospective-gated Multi-Gradient-Echo (MGE) sequence. Approach: First-order GMN were added to MGE sequence. Retrospective ECG-gating was performed on murine heart. Results: FC technique can potentially reduce T2* estimation error by mitigating the flow artifact on echo images in mice heart with very fast heart rate. Impact: First-order Gradient Moment Nulling minimizes image artifacts and enhances the accuracy of myocardial T2* measurements.