Autocalibrated cardiac tissue phase mapping with multiband imaging and k-t acceleration

Abstract

Purpose: To develop an autocalibrated multiband (MB) CAIPIRINHA acquisition scheme with in-plane k-t acceleration enabling multislice three-directional tissue phase mapping in one breath-hold.

Methods: A k-t undersampling scheme was integrated into a time-resolved electrocardiographic-triggered autocalibrated MB gradient-echo sequence. The sequence was used to acquire data on 4 healthy volunteers with MB factors of two (MB2) and three (MB3), which were reconstructed using a joint reconstruction algorithm that tackles both k-t and MB acceleration. Forward simulations of the imaging process were used to tune the reconstruction model hyperparameters. Direct comparisons between MB and single-band tissue phase-mapping measurements were performed.

Results: Simulations showed that the velocities could be accurately reproduced with MB2 k-t (average ± twice the SD of the RMS error of 0.08 ± 0.22 cm/s and velocity peak reduction of 1.03% ± 6.47% compared with fully sampled velocities), whereas acceptable results were obtained with MB3 k-t (RMS error of 0.13 ± 0.58 cm/s and peak reduction of 2.21% ± 13.45%). When applied to tissue phase-mapping data, the proposed technique allowed three-directional velocity encoding to be simultaneously acquired at two/three slices in a single breath-hold of 18 heartbeats. No statistically significant differences were detected between MB2/MB3 k-t and single-band k-t motion traces averaged over the myocardium. Regional differences were found, however, when using the American Heart Association model for segmentation.

Conclusion: An autocalibrated MB k-t acquisition/reconstruction framework is presented that allows three-directional velocity encoding of the myocardial velocities at multiple slices in one breath-hold.

Keywords: autocalibration; cardiac tissue phase mapping; multiband k-t acceleration; multiband k-t reconstruction; single breath-hold.