This thesis focuses on cardiac imaging and quantification of T1 relaxation time in rat hearts. Its main focus is to investigate available methods for such quantification and their application in the development of quantification tools. The large impact is given to methods of acquisition synchronization, mainly with respect to cardiac motion and breathing using retrospective gating, where the navigator signal is obtained solely from the acquired data, so without any external equipment such as the ECG or respiratory sensors. This paper takes into account situations where steady-state has been reached and also those where it has not, by means of contrast agent injection or by inversion pulses.

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T1 mapping of myocardial tissue is important for diagnostics of myocardial fibrosis. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging of small animals is challenging due to high heart and respiratory rates. Pulse sequences for T1 mapping are proposed in this thesis based on inversion recovery FLASH and Intragate FLASH. The sequence IR FLASH was compared to the reference sequence RARE on a static phantom. Both sequences were applied for measuring the myocardium of a rat. For T1 quantification a software in Matlab was developed. Using this software, T1 maps of rat myocardium were calculated.