First‐pass contrast‐enhanced myocardial perfusion MRI in mice on a 3‐T clinical MR scanner

First‐pass contrast‐enhanced myocardial perfusion MRI in rodents has so far not been possible due to the temporal and spatial resolution requirements. We developed a new first‐pass perfusion MR method for rodent imaging on a clinical 3.0‐T scanner (Philips Healthcare, Best, The Netherlands) that employed 10‐fold k ‐space and time domain undersampling with constrained image reconstruction, using temporal basis sets ( k‐t principle component analysis) to achieve a spatial resolution of 0.2 × 0.2 × 1.5mm 3 and an acquisition window of 43 msec. The method was successfully tested in five healthy and four infarcted mice (C57BL/6J) at heart rates of 495.1 ± 45.8 beats/min. Signal‐intensity‐time profiles showed a percentage myocardial signal increase of 141.3 ± 38.9% in normal mice, compared with 44.7 ± 32.4% in infarcted segments. Mean myocardial blood flow by Fermi function for constrained deconvolution in control mice was 7.3 ± 1.5 mL/g/min, comparable to published literature, with no significant differences between three myocardial segments. In infarcted segments, myocardial blood flow was significantly reduced to 1.2 ± 0.8 mL/g/min ( P < 0.01). This is the first report of first‐pass myocardial perfusion MR in a mouse model on a clinical 3‐T MR scanner and using a k‐t undersampling method. Data were acquired on a 3‐T scanner, using an approach similar to clinical acquisition protocols, thus facilitating translation of imaging findings between rodent and human studies. Magn Reson Med, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.