TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lohr, David
A1  - Terekhov, Maxim
A1  - Weng, Andreas Max
A1  - Schroeder, Anja
A1  - Walles, Heike
A1  - Schreiber, Laura Maria
T1  - Spin echo based cardiac diffusion imaging at 7T: An ex vivo study of the porcine heart at 7T and 3T
JF  - PLoS ONE
N2  - Purpose of this work was to assess feasibility of cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (cDTI) at 7 T in a set of healthy, unfixed, porcine hearts using various parallel imaging acceleration factors and to compare SNR and derived cDTI metrics to a reference measured at 3 T. Magnetic resonance imaging was performed on 7T and 3T whole body systems using a spin echo diffusion encoding sequence with echo planar imaging readout. Five reference (b = 0 s/mm\(^2\)) images and 30 diffusion directions (b = 700 s/mm\(^2\)) were acquired at both 7 T and 3 T using a GRAPPA acceleration factor R = 1. Scans at 7 T were repeated using R = 2, R = 3, and R = 4. SNR evaluation was based on 30 reference (b = 0 s/mm\(^2\)) images of 30 slices of the left ventricle and cardiac DTI metrics were compared within AHA segmentation. The number of hearts scanned at 7 T and 3 T was n = 11. No statistically significant differences were found for evaluated helix angle, secondary eigenvector angle, fractional anisotropy and apparent diffusion coefficient at the different field strengths, given sufficiently high SNR and geometrically undistorted images. R≥3 was needed to reduce susceptibility induced geometric distortions to an acceptable amount. On average SNR in myocardium of the left ventricle was increased from 29±3 to 44±6 in the reference image (b = 0 s/mm\(^2\)) when switching from 3 T to 7 T. Our study demonstrates that high resolution, ex vivo cDTI is feasible at 7 T using commercial hardware.
KW  - Heart
KW  - Diffusion tensor imaging
KW  - Eigenvectors
KW  - Cardiac ventricles
KW  - Tractography
KW  - Magnetic resonance imaging
KW  - Data acquisition
KW  - Swine
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-201376
VL  - 14
IS  - 3
ER  -