Purpose

To develop and evaluate complementary radial tagging (CRT) for improved myocardial tagging contrast.

Methods

We sought to develop and evaluate CRT, which aims to preserve the radial tag contrast throughout the cardiac cycle. Similar to complementary spatial modulation of magnetization, CRT acquires two sets of images with a phase shift in the tag pattern. The combination of a ramped imaging flip angle and image subtraction enhances tag contrast throughout the cardiac cycle. The proposed CRT technique uses a small table shift away from the isocenter to improve the uniformity of the radial tag pattern. We provide a mathematical solution for the optimal table shift and validate the solution in using a retrospective analysis of images from 500 patients in the Cardiac Atlas Project database.

Results

CRT simulations, phantom experiments, and in vivo images all demonstrate the improved tag contrast of CRT compared to RT. The retrospective evaluation demonstrated that acceptable CRT images could be acquired in over 98% of the clinical exams.

Conclusion

The CRT technique improves radial tag contrast throughout the cardiac cycle and should produce high quality tag patterns in nearly all patients.

Abstract Background Displacement encoded Cardiovascular MR (CMR) can provide high spatial resolution measurements of three-dimensional (3D) Lagrangian displacement. Spatial gradients of the Lagrangian displacement field are used to measure regional myocardial strain. In general, adjacent parallel slices are needed in order to calculate the spatial gradient in the through-slice direction. This necessitates the acquisition of additional data and prolongs the scan time. The goal of this study is to define an analytic solution that supports the reconstruction of the out-of-plane components of the Lagrangian strain tensor in addition to the in-plane components from a single-slice displacement CMR dataset with high spatio-temporal resolution. The technique assumes incompressibility of the myocardium as a physical constraint. Results The feasibility of the method is demonstrated in a healthy human subject and the results are compared to those of other studies. The proposed method was validated with simulated data and strain estimates from experimentally measured DENSE data, which were compared to the strain calculation from a conventional two-slice acquisition. Conclusion This analytical method reduces the need to acquire data from adjacent slices when calculating regional Lagrangian strains and can effectively reduce the long scan time by a factor of two.