3D free-breathing cardiac magnetic resonance fingerprinting

Purpose: To develop a novel respiratory motion compensated three-dimensional (3D) cardiac magnetic resonance fingerprinting (cMRF) approach for whole-heart myocardial T₁ and T₂ mapping from a free-breathing scan. Methods: Two-dimensional (2D) cMRF has been recently proposed for simultaneous, co-registered T₁ and T₂ mapping from a breath-hold scan; however, coverage is limited. Here we propose a novel respiratory motion compensated 3D cMRF approach for whole-heart myocardial T₁ and T₂ tissue characterization from a free-breathing scan. Variable inversion recovery and T₂ preparation modules are used for parametric encoding, respiratory bellows driven localized autofocus is proposed for beat-to-beat translation motion correction and a subspace regularized reconstruction is employed to accelerate the scan. The proposed 3D cMRF approach was evaluated in a standardized T₁/T₂ phantom in comparison with reference spin echo values and in 10 healthy subjects in comparison with standard 2D MOLLI, SASHA and T₂-GraSE mapping techniques at 1.5 T. Results: 3D cMRF T₁ and T₂ measurements were generally in good agreement with reference spin echo values in the phantom experiments, with relative errors of 2.9% and 3.8% for T₁ and T₂ (T₂ < 100 ms), respectively. in vivo left ventricle (LV) myocardial T₁ values were 1054 ± 19 ms for MOLLI, 1146 ± 20 ms for SASHA and 1093 ± 24 ms for the proposed 3D cMRF; corresponding T₂ values were 51.8 ± 1.6 ms for T2-GraSE and 44.6 ± 2.0 ms for 3D cMRF. LV coefficients of variation were 7.6 ± 1.6% for MOLLI, 12.1 ± 2.7% for SASHA and 5.8 ± 0.8% for 3D cMRF T₁, and 10.5 ± 1.4% for T2-GraSE and 11.7 ± 1.6% for 3D cMRF T₂. Conclusion: The proposed 3D cMRF can provide whole-heart, simultaneous and co-registered T₁ and T₂ maps with accuracy and precision comparable to those of clinical standards in a single free-breathing scan of about 7 min.