To develop a motion‐corrected 3D flow‐insensitive imaging approach interleaved T₂ prepared‐inversion recovery (iT₂prep‐IR) for simultaneous lumen and wall visualization of the great thoracic vessels and cardiac structures.

A 3D flow‐insensitive approach for simultaneous cardiovascular lumen and wall visualization (iT₂prep) has been previously proposed. This approach requires subject‐dependent weighted subtraction to completely null the arterial blood signal in the black‐blood volume. Here, we propose an (T₂prep‐IR) approach to improve wall visualization and remove need for weighted subtraction. The proposed sequence is based on the acquisition and direct subtraction of 2 interleaved 3D whole‐heart data sets acquired with and without T₂prep‐IR preparation. Image navigators are acquired before data acquisition to enable 2D translational and 3D non‐rigid motion correction allowing 100% respiratory scan efficiency. The proposed approach was evaluated in 10 healthy subjects and compared with the conventional 2D double inversion recovery (DIR) sequence and the 3D iT₂prep sequence. Additionally, 5 patients with congenital heart disease were acquired to test the clinical feasibility of the proposed approach.

The proposed iT₂prep‐IR sequence showed improved blood nulling compared to both DIR and iT₂prep techniques in terms of SNR (SNR_blood = 6.9, 12.2, and 18.2, respectively) and contrast‐to‐noise‐ratio (CNR_myoc‐blood = 28.4, 15.4, and 15.3, respectively). No statistical difference was observed between iT₂prep‐IR, iT₂prep and DIR atrial and ventricular wall thickness quantification.

The proposed interleaved T₂prep‐IR sequence enables the simultaneous lumen and wall visualization of cardiac structures and shows promising results in terms of SNR, CNR, and wall thickness measurement.