Figure 1

Schematic of the myocardial ASL pulse sequence. (a) Reference method [12] and (b) accelerated method, using rate-2 SENSE acceleration. The pulse sequence consists of a FAIR labeling pulse (red), a fat saturation pulse (green), a Kaiser-Bessel ramp up (yellow), balanced SSFP image acquisition (blue), and a Kaiser-Bessel ramp down (yellow). The FAIR labeling inversion pulse is triggered to occur at mid-diastole. The center of the acquisition window is set to occur precisely one heartbeat after the tagging pulse. These diagrams are to scale for a heart rate of 60 beats per minute.