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 (Delta T-1 = 1.5%, P = 0.031 and Delta T-2 = - 7.1%, P < 0.001). In 61 consecutive patients referred for CMR, the native T-1 values were slightly lower (Delta T-1 = 1.6%; P = 0.02), while T-2 values did not show statistical difference (Delta T-2 = 4.3%; P = 0.11). However, the difference was higher in post-contrast myocardial T-1 values (Delta T-1 = 12.3%; P < 0.001), which was reflected in the extracellular volume (Delta ECV = 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.

Automated summary

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (cMRF) has shown to be a robust and accurate technique for T-1 and T-2 mapping. This study compared cMRF with a shorter acquisition window and low-rank reconstruction to routine cardiac mapping techniques. The proposed cMRF demonstrated higher accuracy and a wider range in phantom studies. In healthy volunteers and patients, cMRF showed significant differences in myocardial T-1 and T-2 compared to routine mapping. However, cMRF had lower precision but higher spatial resolution when compared to routine techniques.