Automatic Inversion Time Tracking for Late Gadolinium Enhancement Cardiac MRI

Motivation: MRI provides gold standard cardiac imaging, but tracking the ever-changing Inversion Time (TI) is labor intensive and time consuming. Goal(s): Here we seek to find a method to ameliorate the effort of manually tracking the TI. Approach: Using automatic TI data from 3 sites, and images from patients and volunteers, we were able to develop a prior constrained fitting that allows for improved TI tracking over time. Results: TI rate of change is 3-6 ms/min for 1.5 to 3T systems with a standard deviation of 1.4-2.9. Prior constrained TI calibration allows for more accurate TI times without recalibration. Impact: Removing the need for the operator to monitor Inversion Time (TI) frees them to monitor other aspects of the scanning process. When TI determination can be scheduled and acquired automatically it automates and optimizes critical diagnostic imaging.