A new method to suppress ghosting artifacts arising from long-T1 species in segmented inversion recovery (IR) sequences

Background Bright ghosting due to long-T1 species (e.g. cerebrospinal fluid, pericardial or pleural effusion, fig. 1) often hampers the identification of infarcted myocardium on delayed enhancement CMR. The artifacts are caused by signal oscillations of the long-T1 species due to the periodic application of IR pulses. Previous methods use a dummy heartbeat (+HB, sequence run without data acquisition for leading heartbeat) or various pre-pulses (SR or IR). Both techniques may result in insufficient suppression or may be cumbersome to use. We developed a new suppression method utilizing saturation pulses (followed by “crusher” gradient pulses) after each readout (+Po) in combination with a dummy heartbeat. This method does not require user input. We tested it against four other suppression methods by quantifying the long-T1 ghosting seen in the respective images.