feifei Qu1,
Ramkumar Krishnamurthy2, Amol Pednekar3, Benjamin Y.
Cheong4, Claudio Arena4, Pei-Herng Hor1,
Raja Muthupillai5
1Physics,
University of Houston, Houston, TX, United States; 2BioEngineering,
Rice University, Houston, TX, United States; 3Philips HealthCare,
Houston, TX, United States; 4Radiology, St. Lukes Episcopal
Hospital, Houston, TX, United States; 5Radiology, St. Luke's
Episcopal Hospital, Houston, TX, United States
The combination of SENSE, and ZOOM allowed us to reduce the total number of phase encoding steps without compromising spatial resolution, as well as the incorporation of variable refocusing flip angle readout to maintain the myocardial signal intensity during the readout, allows one to acquire DIR-BB prepared T1 weighed images of the heart within a reasonable breathhold of 5-7 s per slice. Our results show that myocardial to liver contrast can be improved by 50 %.