Quantification of myocardial blood flow using magnetic resonance imaging with different accelerated pulse sequences

Abstract

The aim of this study was to compare SRTurboFLASH, SR-TrueFISP, and SR-segEPI pulse sequences using a twofold TSENSE-acceleration with regard to their use in quantification of myocardial blood flow (MBF). Six healthy volunteers were examined at 1.5T by first pass myocardial perfusion MRI at rest using all three TSENSE-accelerated pulse sequences. For absolute quantifi-cation of MBF XSIM software with the MMID4 model has been used. MBF analyses revealed significant MBF differences between SRTurboFLASH and SR-segEPI compared to SR-TrueFISP (p<0.005 and p<0.001, respectively). Differences between SRTurboFLASH and SR-segEPI were not statistically significant. The median MBF values for SR-TurboFLASH, SR-TrueFISP, and SR-segEPI were 0.77, 0.91, and 0.72 ml/min/g, respectively. Fit quality of the MMID4-fits was clearly better with SRTrueFISP (median correla-tion coefficient (R2) = 0.923) than with SR-TurboFLASH (R2 = 0.831) and SR-segEPI (R2 = 0.861). Also SR-segEPI yielded better R2 values than SRTurboFLASH. Besides better image quality than SRTurboFLASH and SR-segEPI, SR-TrueFISP using TSENSE also yields better fit quality in absolute quantification of MBF when using XSIM with the MMID4 model. The better fit quality should result in more reliable MBF values. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.