Figure 1

Signal decay is rapid in heavily iron loaded hearts causing the curve to plateau for the longer echo times. The upper frame shows how later points that fall below background noise level are removed to improve curve fit (red crosses) using the truncation method (R²= 0.9989 with truncation). For the black blood acquisition (b) background noise is reduced thus the curve fit is good for the full range of echo times without truncation (R² = 0.9995) which reduces the likelihood of analysis errors.