Myocardial T1 mapping is a quantitative MRI technique that has found great clinical utility in the detection of various heart disease. These acquisitions typically require three breath-holds, leading to long scan durations and patient discomfort. Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging has been shown to reduce the scan time of myocardial T1 mapping to a single breath-hold without sacrificing coverage, albeit at reduced precision. In this work, we propose a new reconstruction strategy for SMS imaging that combines the advantages of two different k-space interpolation strategies, while allowing for regularization, in order to improve the precision of accelerated myocardial T1 mapping.@en

The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate a regularized Simultaneous Multi-Slice (SMS) reconstruction method for improved Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CMR). The proposed reconstruction method, SMS with COmpOsition of k-space IntErpolations (SMS-COOKIE) combines the advantages of Iterative Self-consistent Parallel Imaging Reconstruction (SPIRiT) and split slice-Generalized Autocalibrating Partially Parallel Acquisitions (GRAPPA), while allowing regularization for further noise reduction. The proposed SMS-COOKIE was implemented with and without regularization, and validated using a Saturation Pulse-Prepared Heart rate Independent inversion REcovery (SAPPHIRE) myocardial T 1 mapping sequence. The performance of the proposed reconstruction method was compared to ReadOut (RO)–SENSE-GRAPPA and split slice-GRAPPA, on both retrospectively and prospectively three-fold SMS-accelerated data with an additional two-fold in-plane acceleration. All SMS reconstruction methods yielded similar T 1 values compared to single band imaging. SMS-COOKIE showed lower spatial variability in myocardial T 1 with significant improvement over RO-SENSE-GRAPPA and split slice-GRAPPA (P < 10 −4). The proposed method with additional locally low rank (LLR) regularization reduced the spatial variability, again with significant improvement over RO-SENSE-GRAPPA and split slice-GRAPPA (P < 10 −4). In conclusion, improved reconstruction quality was achieved with the proposed SMS-COOKIE, which also provided lower spatial variability with significant improvement over split slice-GRAPPA. @en