High resolution simulation and measurement demonstrate oscillatory spatiotemporal B0 fluctuations across the human cardiac cycle

Abstract

Purpose: Functional cardiac MRI scans employing balanced steady-state free precession sequences suffer from dark band artifacts in the myocardium due to B0 inhomogeneity. We recently introduced a novel method for the theoretical derivation of B0 distributions in the human heart. This study aims to simulate the B0 distributions in the heart across the cardiac cycle using structural MR images and validate the simulations via in vivo measured cardiac phase-specific B0 maps on the same subjects at 3T. Methods: Cardiac phase-specific B0 field maps were acquired from eight healthy subjects at 3T. B0 conditions were simulated based on tissue masks created from the cardiac-phase specific structural images from the in vivo B0 map scan and anatomical images from a thoracic MRI scan, adopting our recently published approach. The simulations and in vivo measurements were compared by calculating the spatial correlation of their B0 distributions and temporal correlation of the derived spherical harmonic coefficients throughout the cardiac cycle. Results: The spatial comparison of B0 maps between the simulation and in vivo measurement indicates an overall average correlation coefficient of 0.91 across the cardiac cycle in all subjects. Both groups show consistent high-level B0 patterns. Temporal variations of B0 conditions exhibit sinusoidal characteristics and are strongly correlated between simulation and in vivo. Conclusion: Theoretical simulations employing regional anatomical features were validated by direct in vivo B0 mapping in the same subjects. The spatial B0 condition throughout the cardiac cycle exhibits oscillatory characteristics due to structural distortions of cardiac motion.