Myocardial Tissue Tracking with Two-dimensional Cine Displacement-encoded MR Imaging: Development and Initial Evaluation

A breath-hold two-dimensional cine magnetic resonance (MR) pulse sequence based on displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) for quantitative myocardial motion tracking was developed and evaluated. In the sequence, complementary spatial modulation of magnetization was used for time-independent artifact suppression, and echo-planar imaging was used for rapid data sampling. Twelve healthy volunteers underwent cine DENSE MR imaging, and six of them also underwent conventional MR imaging myocardial tagging. The circumferential shortening component of strain (E_cc) was measured on cine DENSE MR images and conventional tagged MR images. With complementary spatial modulation of magnetization, 10% or less of the total cine DENSE MR image energy was attributed to an artifact-generating echo during systolic imaging. Two-dimensional intramyocardial displacement and strain were measured at cine DENSE MR imaging with spatial resolution and temporal resolution of 2.7 × 2.7 mm and 60 msec, respectively. E_cc measured at cine DENSE MR imaging correlated well with that measured at conventional MR imaging tagging (slope = 0.88, intercept = 0.00, R = 0.87).