Acceleration of tissue phase mapping with sensitivity encoding at 3T

BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of sensitivity encoding on the quantitative assessment of cardiac motion in black blood cine tissue phase mapping (TPM) sequences. Up to now whole volume coverage of the heart is still limited by the long acquisition times. Therefore, a significant increase in imaging speed without deterioration of quantitative motion information is indispensable. METHODS: 20 volunteers were enrolled in this study. Each volunteer underwent myocardial short-axis TPM scans with different SENSE acceleration factors. The influence of SENSE acceleration on the measured motion curves was investigated. RESULTS: It is demonstrated that all TPM sequences with SENSE acceleration have only minimum influence on the motion curves. Even with a SENSE factor of four, the decrease in the amplitude of the motion curve was less than 3%. No significant difference was observed for the global correlation coefficient and deviation between the motion curves obtained by the reproducibility and the SENSE accelerated measurements. CONCLUSIONS: It is feasible to accelerate myocardial TPM measurements with SENSE factors up to 4 without losing substantial information of the motion pattern.