Spiral tissue phase velocity mapping in a breath-hold with non-cartesian SENSE.

PURPOSE: Tissue phase velocity mapping (TPVM) is capable of reproducibly measuring regional myocardial velocities. However acquisition durations of navigator gated techniques are long and unpredictable while current breath-hold techniques have low temporal resolution. This study presents a spiral TPVM technique which acquires high resolution data within a clinically acceptable breath-hold duration.
METHODS: Ten healthy volunteers are scanned using a spiral sequence with temporal resolution of 24 ms and spatial resolution of 1.7 × 1.7 mm. Retrospective cardiac gating is used to acquire data over the entire cardiac cycle. The acquisition is accelerated by factors of 2 and 3 by use of non-Cartesian SENSE implemented on the Gadgetron GPU system resulting in breath-holds of 17 and 13 heartbeats, respectively. Systolic, early diastolic, and atrial systolic global and regional longitudinal, circumferential, and radial velocities are determined.
RESULTS: Global and regional velocities agree well with those previously reported. The two acceleration factors show no significant differences for any quantitative parameter and the results also closely match previously acquired higher spatial resolution navigator-gated data in the same subjects.
CONCLUSION: By using spiral trajectories and non-Cartesian SENSE high resolution, TPVM data can be acquired within a clinically acceptable breath-hold.