An Alternating Partial Fourier k-space Segmentation Scheme for Imaging of Myocardial Delayed Enhancement

Purpose: Myocardial delayed enhancement (MDE) is commonly used to assess viability of myocardial tissue. An ECG gated, segmented inversion recovery (IR) fast gradient recalled echo (FGRE) or a steady-state free precession (SSFP) sequence is used for imaging, 15-20 minutes after administration of Gadolinium-based contrast. Multiple slices are typically acquired in successive breath-holds. Single shot methods have been proposed to reduce the BH duration at the cost of poor spatio-temporal resolution. In order to minimize sensitivity to inversion time selection, phase sensitive inversion recovery (PSIR) techniques have been proposed [1] which acquire a reference phase correction dataset, further doubling the scan time. In this work, we investigated the use of a time efficient alternating partial Fourier (APF) k-space segmentation strategy.