Optimized saturation recovery protocols for T1-mapping in the heart: influence of sampling strategies on precision

BACKGROUND: T1-mapping has the potential to detect and quantify diffuse processes such as interstitial fibrosis. Detection of disease at an early stage by measurement of subtle changes requires a high degree of reproducibility. Initial implementation of saturation recovery (SR) T1-mapping employed 3-parameter fitting which was highly accurate but was quite sensitive to noise; 2-parameter fitting greatly reduced the sensitivity to noise at the expense of a small degree of systematic bias. A recently introduced implementation that uses a variable readout flip angle greatly reduces systematic errors in T1-measurement thereby making it feasible to use SR methods with 2-parameter fitting with improved accuracy and precision. SR T1 mapping techniques with multi-heartbeat recovery times have been proposed to better sample the T1 recovery curve, but have not been evaluated for 2-parameter fitting. METHODS: An analytic formulation for calculating the standard deviation (SD) for SR T1-mapping with 2-parameter fitting is developed and validated using Monte-Carlo simulation. The coefficient of variation is compared for a brute force optimization of sampling and for several previously described sampling schemes for T1 measurement over several uncertainty ranges. Experimental validation is performed in phantoms over a range of T1, and in-vivo both native and post-contrast. Pixel-wise SD maps are calculated for SR T1-mapping. RESULTS: Sampling schemes that use a non-saturated anchor image and multiple (N) measurements at a single fixed saturation delay are found to be near optimum for the case of known T1 and are close to the brute force optimized solution over wide ranges of native and post-contrast T1 values. The fixed delay sampling scheme is simple to implement and provides an improvement over uniformly distributed schemes. CONCLUSIONS: Sampling strategies for saturation recovery methods for myocardial T1-mapping have been optimized and validated experimentally. Reduced SD, or improved precision, may be achieved by using fixed saturation delays when considering native myocardium and post-contrast T1 ranges. Pixel-wise estimates of T1 mapping errors have been formulated and validated for SR fitting methods.