Motivation: While~T₁~of the whole heart provides valuable diagnostic information, conventional methods are limited to single-slice acquisitions requiring multiple acquisitions and prolonging measurements due to repetitive breath-holds. Goal (s): Development of rapid multi-slice T₁~mapping with high spatial resolution. Approach: A radial single-shot IR-FLASH with slice-interleaved SMS-readout and total acquisition time of four seconds is combined with model-based reconstruction exploiting a linear subspace. The technique was validated in phantom and in-vivo scans. Results: Accuracy of T₁ in a phantom study were independent of simulated heart-rates with mean difference under~8~ms. Nine high-resolution short-axis myocardial~T₁~maps with whole-heart coverage were compared to Open-MOLLI and single-slice IR-FLASH showing a difference of~38~ms. Impact: High resolution multi-slice T₁ quantification covering the whole-heart can be achieved within a short breath-hold of four seconds, which improves patient comfort, reduces motion artifacts, and improves the clinical feasibility of whole-heart T₁ mapping.
Mackner et al. (Tue,) studied this question.