Imaging Sequence Type:
- FIESTA (GE), TrueFISP (Siemens), Balanced FFE (Philips), True SSFP (Toshiba)
- Acquisition generally occurs over several heartbeats, but within a breathhold
Acquisition Mode:
- Single slice, mutliphase (i.e. a single slice cine can be acquired with each breathhold)
- Multislice, single phase (i.e. a series of image locations, one image per location, each at a slightly different cardiac phase)
Image Contrast:
- Bright Blood
- T2/T1 (signal directly related to the tissue’s T2 and inversely related to its T1): mixed weighting
Imaging Options:
- Fat and water in phase
- Fat and water out of phase
Clinical Utility:
- Best sequence to assess cardiac function
- Bright blood even with slow flow
- Typically shorter TR than with gradient echo imaging -implies shorter breathholds or higher spatial resolution for the same breathhold time.
- Less sensitive for detecting turbulent flow due to valvular disease or intracardiac shunts (short TE)
- Flow artifacts due off-resonance effects: worse with longer TRs, nearby feromagnetic implants, and higher field strengths (e.g. 3T).
