Selection of sampling points for saturation recovery based myocardial T1 mapping

Background Quantitative myocardial T1 mapping allows assessment of focal and diffuse fibrosis in the myocardium, by sampling the T1 relaxation curve using inversion [1] or saturation recovery (SR) preparation [2] or a combination of both [3], followed by the acquisition of multiple images with different contrasts, which are subsequently fitted to a parametric equation pixel-wise to yield the T1 maps. In myocardial T1 mapping, there is a degree of freedom in selecting which points on the relaxation curve are sampled. However, this topic has not been studied. In this study, we sought to develop an estimation theoretic framework for optimal selection of sampling points and characterized the variance of the corresponding T1 estimator for sampling of the SR curve.