Rat heart T2-mapping with full coverage of the left ventricle myocardium

Background MRI cardiac T2-mapping visualizes edema and has been used for tissue characterization in settings such as myocarditis and ischemia. Clinically it is typically performed via spin-echo based techniques, but preclinically, the high heart rates of rats and mice make such approaches sensitive to motion. Successful implementations instead employ T2-preparation followed by a segmented gradient-echo readout (Beyers et al. MRM 2012, Coolen et al. MRM 2014). It is argued here that when full coverage of the left ventricle myocardium (LVM) is needed, such techniques benefit from applying phase encoding in the slice direction as opposed to using a multi-slice approach.