Intra- and inter-exam reproducibility of left ventricular twist measurements using Fourier analysis of STimulated Echoes (FAST)

Background Assessing the reproducibility of new quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarkers is an important part of validation [1-3]. Fourier Analysis of STimulated Echoes (FAST) [4] is a new MRI tissue tagging method that has recently been shown to compare favorably to conventional estimates of left ventricular (LV) twist from cardiac tagged images, but with significantly reduced user interaction time (less than ~3 minutes) and low intra- and interobserver variability. The purpose of this study was to assess the intra- and inter-exam reproducibility of LV twist using FAST.