Fig. 1

Schematic pulse sequence diagram of free-breathing late gadolinium enhancement (LGE). a The pulse sequence is electrocardiogram (ECG)-triggered to end-diastolic cardiac phase with TI based on the estimation for breath-hold LGE with the additional time delay of free-breathing LGE being taken into account by adding 50 ms. Prior to data acquisition, a pencil-beam navigator for respiratory gating to end-expiratory phase is employed followed by Spectral FatSat (spectral fat suppression) to avoid signal contribution by epicardial fat. b Imaging data is acquired using balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP). In every cardiac cycle, 35 k-space lines are acquired, resulting in a shot duration of 150 ms. c A variable density incoherent sampling patter with high-density in the k-space center and continuously decreasing sampling density towards the k-space periphery was employed for data acquisition using Compressed SENSE