Imaging Ascending Aortic Wall Stretch Using Breath-Held Displacement Encoding with Stimulated Echoes MRI: An Intra-scan Reproducibility Study

In vivo assessment of the mechanical properties of the aorta stands to offer valuable information to evaluate and predict the progression of cardiovascular diseases. Displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) is a non-invasive phase-contrast MRI technique that has been adapted to measure ascending aortic wall stretch. Previous studies utilizing long respiratory-gated acquisitions are prone to artifacts from residual cardiac or respiratory motion. In this study, we investigated the reproducibility of a novel breath-held aortic DENSE imaging protocol. The proposed breath-held protocol was highly reproducible (COV=3.27% and LCCC=0.97). Finally, the measured aortic stretch followed the expected relationship with age.