Water–fat Dixon cardiac magnetic resonance fingerprinting

PURPOSE: Cardiac magnetic resonance fingerprinting (cMRF) has been recently introduced to simultaneously provide T1 , T2 , and M0 maps. Here, we develop a 3-point Dixon-cMRF approach to enable simultaneous water specific T1 , T2 , and M0 mapping of the heart and fat fraction (FF) estimation in a single breath-hold scan. METHODS: Dixon-cMRF is achieved by combining cMRF with several innovations that were previously introduced for other applications, including a 3-echo GRE acquisition with golden angle radial readout and a high-dimensional low-rank tensor constrained reconstruction to recover the highly undersampled time series images for each echo. Water-fat separation of the Dixon-cMRF time series is performed to allow for water- and fat-specific T1 , T2 , and M0 estimation, whereas FF estimation is extracted from the M0 maps. Dixon-cMRF was evaluated in a standardized T1 -T2 phantom, in a water-fat phantom, and in healthy subjects in comparison to current clinical standards: MOLLI, SASHA, T2 -GRASE, and 6-point Dixon proton density FF (PDFF) mapping. RESULTS: Dixon-cMRF water T1 and T2 maps showed good agreement with reference T1 and T2 mapping techniques (R(2) > 0.99 and maximum normalized RMSE ~5%) in a standardized phantom. Good agreement was also observed between Dixon-cMRF FF and reference PDFF (R(2) > 0.99) and between Dixon-cMRF water T1 and T2 and water selective T1 and T2 maps (R(2) > 0.99) in a water-fat phantom. In vivo Dixon-cMRF water T1 values were in good agreement with MOLLI and water T2 values were slightly underestimated when compared to T2 -GRASE. Average myocardium septal T1 values were 1129 +/- 38 ms, 1026 +/- 28 ms, and 1045 +/- 32 ms for SASHA, MOLLI, and the proposed water Dixon-cMRF. Average T2 values were 51.7 +/- 2.2 ms and 42.8 +/- 2.6 ms for T2 -GRASE and water Dixon-cMRF, respectively. Dixon-cMRF FF maps showed good agreement with in vivo PDFF measurements (R(2) > 0.98) and average FF in the septum was measured at 1.3%. CONCLUSION: The proposed Dixon-cMRF allows to simultaneously quantify myocardial water T1 , water T2 , and FF in a single breath-hold scan, enabling multi-parametric T1 , T2 , and fat characterization. Moreover, reduced T1 and T2 quantification bias caused by water-fat partial volume was demonstrated in phantom experiments.