Fig. 4

(a) measured through-plane velocities under dobutamine stress (120 bpm) over the cardiac cycle for left ventricular myocardium and blood pool. Mean and standard deviation over the respectively segmented areas are presented. Contrast of the proposed excitation is based on velocity differences between tissue and blood as highlighted in grey. Early systole (red box) and early diastole are therefore especially suited heart phases for the proposed method. (b) histogram of velocity distributions inside LV myocardium and blood pool in early systole (red box, top plot). Mean and standard deviation over both compartments are overlaid in black. Relative excitation amplitudes for encoding with the mean velocity inside the LV blood pool are shown in red. Blood pool signal is strongly suppressed whilst myocardial signal is largely retained