Background: Quantitative estimates of myocardial perfusion generally require accurate measurement of the arterial input function (AIF). The saturation of signal intensity in the blood that occurs with most doses of contrast agent makes obtaining an accurate AIF challenging. This work seeks to evaluate the performance of a method that uses a radial k-space perfusion sequence and multiple saturation recovery times (SRT) to quantify myocardial perfusion with cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR).
Methods: Perfusion CMR was performed at 3 Tesla with a saturation recovery radial turboFLASH sequence with 72 rays. Fourteen subjects were given a low dose (0.004 mmol/kg) of dilute (1/5 concentration) contrast agent (Gd-BOPTA) and then a higher non-dilute dose of the same volume (0.02 mmol/kg). AIFs were calculated from the blood signal in three sub-images with differing effective saturation recovery times. The full and sub-images were reconstructed iteratively with a total variation constraint. The images from the full 72 ray data were processed to obtain six tissue enhancement curves in two slices of the left ventricle in each subject. A 2-compartment model was used to determine absolute flows
Results: The proposed multi-SRT method resulted in AIFs that were similar to those obtained with the dual-bolus method. Myocardial blood flow (MBF) estimates from the dual-bolus and the multi-SRT methods were related by MBFmulti-SRT = 0.85MBFdual-bolus + 0.18 (r = 0.91).
Conclusions: The multi-SRT method, which uses a radial k-space perfusion sequence, can be used to obtain an accurate AIF and thus quantify myocardial perfusion for doses of contrast agent that result in a relatively saturated AIF.