Cardiac MR fingerprinting with a short acquisition window in consecutive patients referred for clinical CMR and healthy volunteers

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (cMRF) has been demonstrated to enable robust and accurate T(1) and T(2) mapping for the detection of myocardial fibrosis and edema. However, the relatively long acquisition window (250 ms) used in previous cMRF studies might leave it vulnerable to motion artifacts in patients with high heart rates. The goal of this study was therefore to compare cMRF with a short acquisition window (154 ms) and low-rank reconstruction to routine cardiac T(1) and T(2) mapping at 1.5 T. Phantom studies showed that the proposed cMRF had a high T(1) and T(2) accuracy over a wider range than routine mapping techniques. In 9 healthy volunteers, the proposed cMRF showed small but significant myocardial T(1) and T(2) differences compared to routine mapping (ΔT(1) = 1.5%, P = 0.031 and ΔT(2) = − 7.1%, P < 0.001). In 61 consecutive patients referred for CMR, the native T(1) values were slightly lower (ΔT(1) = 1.6%; P = 0.02), while T(2) values did not show statistical difference (ΔT(2) = 4.3%; P = 0.11). However, the difference was higher in post-contrast myocardial T(1) values (ΔT(1) = 12.3%; P < 0.001), which was reflected in the extracellular volume (ΔECV = 2.4%; P < 0.001). Across all subjects, the proposed cMRF had a lower precision when compared to routine techniques, although its higher spatial resolution enabled the visualization of smaller details.