Myocardial Extracellular Volume Fraction (ECV) Mapping with Cardiac Cine Sequences

Motivation: Myocardial ECV, an important biomarker of several pathologies, is currently assessed in a cumbersome and inefficient way, requiring pre-/post-contrast T1 mapping using breath-held, ECG-gated MOLLI scans, often repeated because of arrhythmia and/or breath-hold failure and prone to cardiac-phase mismatch induced image misregistration errors. Goal(s): Developing an alternative way to efficiently map myocardial ECV using routine cardiac cine imaging. Approach: We propose mapping myocardial ECV using a conventional GRE cine sequence and two-flip-angle DESPOT1 signal model for T1 fitting. We hypothesize the (ratio-of-differences) form of the ECV equation largely mitigates B1+ inhomogeneity effects, to which the DESPOT1 method is sensitive. Impact: Cine-based ECV may substantially reduce patient burden and time-on-table, positively impacting resource utilization and scanner availability for all patients, while boosting clinician confidence in assessing the presence/degree of certain cardiac pathologies through multiple cardiac phase and whole heart coverage.