Myocardial arterial spin labeling perfusion imaging with improved sensitivity

Background: Myocardial arterial spin labeling (ASL) is a noninvasive MRI based technique that is capable of measuring myocardial blood flow (MBF) in humans. It suffers from poor sensitivity to MBF due to high physiological noise (PN). This study aims to determine if the sensitivity of myocardial ASL to MBF can be improved by reducing image acquisition time, via parallel imaging. Methods: Myocardial ASL scans were performed in 7 healthy subjects at rest using flow-sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR) tagging and balanced steady state free precession (SSFP) imaging. Sensitivity encoding (SENSE) with a reduction factor of 2 was used to shorten each image acquisition from roughly 300 ms per heartbeat to roughly 150 ms per heartbeat. A paired Student's t-test was performed to compare measurements of myocardial blood flow (MBF) and physiological noise (PN) from the reference and accelerated methods. Results: The measured PN (mean +/- standard deviation) was 0.20 +/- 0.08 ml/g/min for the reference method and 0.08 +/- 0.05 ml/g/min for the accelerated method, corresponding to a 60% reduction. PN measured from the accelerated method was found to be significantly lower than that of the reference method (p = 0.0059). There was no significant difference between MBF measured from the accelerated and reference ASL methods (p = 0.7297). Conclusions: In this study, significant PN reduction was achieved by shortening the acquisition window using parallel imaging with no significant impact on the measured MBF. This indicates an improvement in sensitivity to MBF and may also enable the imaging of subjects with higher heart rates and imaging during systole.