Toward high-resolution myocardial tagging

Magnetic resonance imaging with preceding tissue tagging is a robust method for assessing cardiac motion of the entire heartbeat cycle with a high deg ree of accuracy. One limitation of this technique, however, is the low reso lution of the obtained displacement map of the labeled points within the my ocardium. By a new tagging technique, which is based on the combination of two or more measurements of the same slice but with different grid position s, a highly improved resolution of cardiac motion data can be achieved. In combination with a multi-heart-phase echo-planar imaging sequence, such ima ges with doubled grid frequency can be acquired in two short breath-hold pe riods. Magn Reson Med 41:639-643, 1999. (C) 1999 Wiley-Liss, Inc.