3D free-breathing cardiac magnetic resonance fingerprinting

Purpose To develop a novel respiratory motion compensated three-dimensional (3D) cardiac magnetic resonance fingerprinting (cMRF) approach for whole-heart myocardialT(1)andT(2)mapping from a free-breathing scan. Methods Two-dimensional (2D) cMRF has been recently proposed for simultaneous, co-registeredT(1)andT(2)mapping from a breath-hold scan; however, coverage is limited. Here we propose a novel respiratory motion compensated 3D cMRF approach for whole-heart myocardialT(1)andT(2)tissue characterization from a free-breathing scan. Variable inversion recovery andT(2)preparation modules are used for parametric encoding, respiratory bellows driven localized autofocus is proposed for beat-to-beat translation motion correction and a subspace regularized reconstruction is employed to accelerate the scan. The proposed 3D cMRF approach was evaluated in a standardizedT(1)/T(2)phantom in comparison with reference spin echo values and in 10 healthy subjects in comparison with standard 2D MOLLI, SASHA andT(2)-GraSE mapping techniques at 1.5 T. Results 3D cMRFT(1)andT(2)measurements were generally in good agreement with reference spin echo values in the phantom experiments, with relative errors of 2.9% and 3.8% forT(1)andT(2)(T-2< 100 ms), respectively. in vivo left ventricle (LV) myocardialT(1)values were 1054 +/- 19 ms for MOLLI, 1146 +/- 20 ms for SASHA and 1093 +/- 24 ms for the proposed 3D cMRF; correspondingT(2)values were 51.8 +/- 1.6 ms for T2-GraSE and 44.6 +/- 2.0 ms for 3D cMRF. LV coefficients of variation were 7.6 +/- 1.6% for MOLLI, 12.1 +/- 2.7% for SASHA and 5.8 +/- 0.8% for 3D cMRFT(1), and 10.5 +/- 1.4% for T2-GraSE and 11.7 +/- 1.6% for 3D cMRFT(2). Conclusion The proposed 3D cMRF can provide whole-heart, simultaneous and co-registeredT(1)andT(2)maps with accuracy and precision comparable to those of clinical standards in a single free-breathing scan of about 7 min.