Feasibility of myocardial T1 mapping from Cine-IR images by image warping

Introduction: In vivo myocardial T1 quantification is challenging because of severe time constraints due to cardiac and respiratory motion. The multipoint approach (Look and Locker) allows sampling the relaxation curve multiple times after an initial preparation pulse achieving the full coverage of the curve in a single breath-hold [1]. The recognized limitation of this approach is that pixel-bypixel T1 mapping of the heart is difficult because data acquisition is performed continuously throughout the cardiac cycle without regard for cardiac motion. Hence, T1 values are usually evaluated only in a single region of interest (ROI), manually defined for every frame. The objective of this study is to develop an image analysis procedure able to provide T1 mapping for multipoint sequences automatically compensating for cardiac motion.