• Taigang He, Peter D Gatehouse, Gillian C Smith, Raad H Mohiaddin, Dudley J Pennell, and David N Firmin.
• National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London, UK.
• Magn Reson Med. 2008 Nov 1; 60 (5): 1082-9.

AbstractReproducible and accurate myocardial T2* measurements are required for the quantification of iron in heart tissue in transfused thalassemia. The aim of this study was to determine the best method to measure the myocardial T2* from multi-gradient-echo data acquired both with and without black-blood preparation. Sixteen thalassemia patients from six centers were scanned twice locally, within 1 week, using an optimized bright-blood T2* sequence and then subsequently scanned at the standardization center in London within 4 weeks, using a T2* sequence both with and without black-blood preparation. Different curve-fitting models (monoexponential, truncation, and offset) were applied to the data and the results were compared by means of reproducibility. T2* measurements obtained using the bright- and black-blood techniques. The black-blood data were well fitted by the monoexponential model, which suggests that a more accurate measure of T2* can be obtained by removing the main source of errors in the bright-blood data. For bright-blood data, the offset model appeared to underestimate T2* values substantially and was less reproducible. The truncation model gave rise to more reproducible T2* measurements, which were also closer to the values obtained from the black-blood data.

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