Single breath-hold slice-following CSPAMM myocardial tagging

Myocardial tagging has shown to be a useful magnetic resonance modality for the assessment and quantification of local myocardial function. Many myocardial tagging techniques suffer from a rapid fading of the tags, restricting their application mainly to systolic phases of the cardiac cycle. However, left ventricular diastolic dysfunction has been increasingly appreciated as a major cause of heart failure. Subtraction based slice- following CSPAMM myocardial tagging has shown to overcome limitations such as fading of the tags. Remaining impediments to this technique, however, are extensive scanning times (~ 10 min), the requirement of repeated breath- holds using a coached breathing pattern, and the enhanced sensitivity to artifacts related to poor patient compliance or inconsistent depths of end- expiratory breath-holds. We therefore propose a combination of slice- following CSPAMM myocardial tagging with a segmented EPI imaging sequence. Together with an optimized RF excitation scheme, this enables to acquire as many as 20 systolic and diastolic grid-tagged images per cardiac cycle with a high tagging contrast during a short period of sustained respiration.