Quality assurance of quantitative cardiac T1-mapping in multicenter clinical trials - A T1 phantom program from the hypertrophic cardiomyopathy registry (HCMR) study.

Quantitative cardiovascular magnetic resonance T1-mapping is increasingly used for myocardial tissue characterization. However, the lack of standardization limits direct comparability between centers and wider roll-out for clinical use or trials. To develop a quality assurance (QA) program assuring standardized T1 measurements for clinical use. MR phantoms manufactured in 2013 were distributed, including ShMOLLI T1-mapping and reference T1 and T2 protocols. We first studied the T1 and T2 dependency on temperature and phantom aging using phantom datasets from a single site over 4 years. Based on this, we developed a multiparametric QA model, which was then applied to 78 scans from 28 other multi-national sites. T1 temperature sensitivity followed a second-order polynomial to baseline T1 values (R The proposed phantom QA for T1-mapping can assure correct method implementation and protocol adherence, and is robust to temperature variation and phantom aging. This QA program circumvents the need of frequent phantom replacements, and can be readily deployed in multicenter trials.

Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Declaration of Competing Interest SKP has patent authorship rights for U.S. patent US20120078084A1. Systems and methods for shortened Look Locker inversion recovery (Sh-MOLLI) cardiac gated mapping of T1. Granted March 15, 2016. IP is managed by Oxford University Innovations; the license exclusively transferred to Siemens Healthcare. QZ, SKP, KW, IAP, VMF have authorship rights for pending patent PCT/GB2020/051189. A method for identity validation and quality assurance of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging protocols. Filed May 15, 2020. IP is owned and managed by Oxford University Innovations.