Simultaneous 3D whole‐heart bright‐blood and black blood imaging for cardiovascular anatomy and wall assessment with interleaved T₂prep‐IR

Purpose To develop a motion‐corrected 3D flow‐insensitive imaging approach interleaved T 2 prepared‐inversion recovery (iT 2 prep‐IR) for simultaneous lumen and wall visualization of the great thoracic vessels and cardiac structures. Methods A 3D flow‐insensitive approach for simultaneous cardiovascular lumen and wall visualization (iT 2 prep) has been previously proposed. This approach requires subject‐dependent weighted subtraction to completely null the arterial blood signal in the black‐blood volume. Here, we propose an (T 2 prep‐IR) approach to improve wall visualization and remove need for weighted subtraction. The proposed sequence is based on the acquisition and direct subtraction of 2 interleaved 3D whole‐heart data sets acquired with and without T 2 prep‐IR preparation. Image navigators are acquired before data acquisition to enable 2D translational and 3D non‐rigid motion correction allowing 100% respiratory scan efficiency. The proposed approach was evaluated in 10 healthy subjects and compared with the conventional 2D double inversion recovery (DIR) sequence and the 3D iT 2 prep sequence. Additionally, 5 patients with congenital heart disease were acquired to test the clinical feasibility of the proposed approach. Results The proposed iT 2 prep‐IR sequence showed improved blood nulling compared to both DIR and iT 2 prep techniques in terms of SNR (SNR blood = 6.9, 12.2, and 18.2, respectively) and contrast‐to‐noise‐ratio (CNR myoc‐blood = 28.4, 15.4, and 15.3, respectively). No statistical difference was observed between iT 2 prep‐IR, iT 2 prep and DIR atrial and ventricular wall thickness quantification. Conclusion The proposed interleaved T 2 prep‐IR sequence enables the simultaneous lumen and wall visualization of cardiac structures and shows promising results in terms of SNR, CNR, and wall thickness measurement.