Purpose: To develop a B1-corrrected single flip-angle continuous acquisition strategy with free-breathing and cardiac self-gating for spiral T1 mapping, and compare it to a previous dual flip-angle technique.
Methods: Data were continuously acquired using a spiral-out trajectory, rotated by the golden angle in time. During the first 2 s, off-resonance Fermi RF pulses were applied to generate a Bloch-Siegert shift B1 map, and the subsequent data were acquired with an inversion RF pulse applied every 4 s to create a T1* map. The final T1 map was generated from the B1 and the T1* maps by using a look-up table that accounted for slice profile effects, yielding more accurate T1 values. T1 values were compared to those from inversion recovery (IR) spin echo (phantom only), MOLLI, SAturation-recovery single-SHot Acquisition (SASHA), and previously proposed dual flip-angle results. This strategy was evaluated in a phantom and 25 human subjects.
Results: The proposed technique showed good agreement with IR spin-echo results in the phantom experiment. For in-vivo studies, the proposed technique and the previously proposed dual flip-angle method were more similar to SASHA results than to MOLLI results.
Conclusions: B1-corrected single flip-angle T1 mapping successfully acquired B1 and T1 maps in a free-breathing, continuous-IR spiral acquisition, providing a method with improved accuracy to measure T1 using a continuous Look-Locker acquisition, as compared to the previously proposed dual excitation flip-angle technique.
Keywords: B1 mapping; T1 mapping; cardiac MRI; dictionary learning; free-breathing; motion-correction; self-gating; spiral trajectory.
© 2022 The Authors. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.