Ultrafast blood T1 measurement at the internal jugular vein using Golden Angle rotated Spiral k-t Sparse Parallel imaging (GASSP)

Motivation: Blood T1 measurement could be accelerated to a single-shot with Golden Angle rotated Spiral k-t Sparse Parallel imaging (GASSP), by exploiting temporal sparsity from the images acquired at successive inversion delays. Goal(s): This work aimed to apply GASSP to reduce measurement time from 60s with 6-shot to 10s with single-shot at 1mm2 in-plane resolution. Approach: On 9 healthy volunteers, GASSP was compared to the traditional EPI readout, and was repeated to assess its intra-scan reproducibility. Results: Blood T1 values measured with highly undersampled GASSP was strongly correlated with traditional EPI readout and exhibited high reproducibility. Impact: This study showed that the ultrafast (~10s) blood T1 measurement at the internal jugular vein with 1mm2 in-plane resolution using Golden Angle rotated Spiral k-t Sparse Parallel imaging (GASSP) yielded comparable performance with EPI and high intra-scan reproducibility.