Biventricular strain analysis at 1.5T cardiac MR imaging: preliminary results in volunteers using an iterative SENSE reconstruction with L1 regularization

Background Changes in myocardial strain have been shown to precede onset of systolic dysfunction in patients with cardiomyopathy. Traditionally performed with echocardiography, acoustic windows can limit strain evaluation. Preliminary work has shown good agreement between myocardial strain derived from deformation field analysis at balanced steady-state free-precession (bSSFP) cine MRI and speckle tracking echocardiography. The application of a novel prototype iterative SENSE reconstruction with L1 regularization (IRSENSE) to highly accelerated segmented bSSFP cine acquisitions can maintain or improve the effective temporal resolution with a shorter breath-hold. The purpose of this study is to evaluate leftand right-ventricular stain analysis from bSSFP cine acquisitions using conventional GRAPPA and highly accelerated T-PAT with IR-SENSE. We hypothesize that myocardial strain parameters derived from accelerated T-PAT cine acquisitions with IR-SENSE are similar to those obtained using conventional segmented bSSFP with comparable effective temporal resolutions.