Direct comparison of in-vivo and post-mortem spin-echo based diffusion tensor imaging in the porcine heart

Background Spin-echo based cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is highly sensitive to myocardial strain [1]. Imaging during systolic contraction requires precise planning of the sequence timing [2]. Second order motion compensated diffusion encoding has recently been proposed for small animal imaging [3] to reduce the impact of myocardial strain on the diffusion tensor. It is the objective of the present work to compare second order motion compensated spin-echo DTI of the in-vivo and post-mortem porcine heart on a clinical MR system.