Impact of Gadolinium injection to the variable Flip Angle scheme of Tag CMR including SENC and SPAMM

Abstract

SENC and SPAMM tagging Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) are specifically optimized for acquisition before contrast injection and tuned to the end-systolic phase. While SPAMM tagging is a non-quantitative approach that indirectly derives functional motion from the displacement of the saturated tags in the myocardium, SENC directly computes myocardial tissue compression (strain) in percentage units. Furthermore, SENC quantitation pipeline bypasses the signal intensity map that exhibits the decay of the embedded strain measurements. In this study, we examine both SPAMM and SENC post-Gd measurements to specifically indicate the effect of the variable RF pulse train tuned to target tissue T1.