Simultaneous Multislice Cardiac Multimapping based on Locally Low-Rank and Sparsity Constraints.

Background: Although quantitative myocardial T1 and T2 mappings are clinically used to evaluate myocardial diseases, their application needs a minimum of 6 breath-holds to cover 3 short-axis slices. The purpose of this work is to simultaneously quantify multi-slice myocardial T1 and T2 across 3 short-axis slices in one breath-hold by combining simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) with Multimapping.

Methods: An SMS-Multimapping sequence with multi-band RF excitations and Cartesian FLASH readouts was developed for data acquisition. When 3 slices are simultaneously acquired, the acceleration rate is around 12-fold, causing a highly ill-conditioned reconstruction problem. To mitigate image artifacts and noise caused by the ill-conditioning, a reconstruction algorithm based on Locally Low-Rank and Sparsity (LLRS) was developed. Validation was performed in phantoms and in vivo imaging, with 20 healthy subjects and 4 patients, regarding regional mean, precision, and scan-rescan reproducibility.

Results: The phantom imaging shows that SMS-Multimapping with LLRS accurately reconstructed multi-slice T1 and T2 maps despite a 6-fold acceleration of scan time. Healthy subject imaging shows that the proposed LLRS algorithm substantially improved image quality relative to split slice-GRAPPA. Compared with MOLLI, SMS-Multimapping exhibited higher T1 mean (1118±43ms vs 1190±49ms, P<0.01), lower precision (67±17ms vs 90±17ms, P<0.01), and acceptable scan-rescan reproducibility measured by two scans 10-minute apart (bias=1.4ms for MOLLI and 9.0ms for SMS-Multimapping). Compared with bSSFP T2 mapping, SMS-Multimapping exhibited similar T2 mean (43.5±3.3ms vs 43.0±3.5ms, P=0.64), similar precision (4.9±2.1ms vs 5.1±1.0ms, P=0.93), and acceptable scan-rescan reproducibility (bias=0.13ms for bSSFP T2 mapping and 0.55ms for SMS-Multimapping). In patients, SMS-Multimapping clearly showed the abnormality in a similar fashion as the reference methods despite using only one breath-hold.

Conclusion: SMS-Multimapping with the proposed LLRS reconstruction can measure multi-slice T1 and T2 maps in one breath-hold with good accuracy, reasonable precision, and acceptable reproducibility, achieving a 6-fold reduction of scan time and an improvement of patient comfort.