Imaging myocardial strain is of growing importance for the assessment of heart disease [
1‐
5]. For example, recent studies have shown that strain imaging is effective for quantifying mechanical dyssynchrony and predicting response to cardiac resynchronization therapy in patients with heart failure [
6] and that strain imaging can detect subclinical systolic dysfunction in patients with diabetes [
7]. Myocardial tagging cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) , a long-established method, has been considered the gold standard method for the noninvasive measurement of myocardial strain [
3,
8]. However, recently cine displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) [
9,
10] has emerged as a strain imaging technique that, compared to tagging, has equivalent accuracy and better interobserver variability [
11]. Additionally, strain analysis for cine DENSE is rapid and far less time consuming than for tagging [
12‐
14]. While cine DENSE has advantages in interobserver variability, analysis time, and spatial resolution, it has the disadvantage that data acquisition times are inherently longer than tagging. The longer scan times for cine DENSE occur because DENSE is a phase-contrast method, requiring n + 1 separate acquisitions in order to reconstruct phase images encoded for displacement in n directions [
15]. While two-dimensional (2D) grid-tagged images are typically acquired during a clinically-convenient single breathhold [
3], common protocols for 2D cine DENSE require two separate breathholds, each acquiring 1D displacement–encoded data and phase-reference data [
6] or using a balanced two-point encoding method [
15]. Acceleration using data undersampling has the potential to enable cine DENSE scans with 2D displacement encoding in less than 10 s without substantial compromises in spatiotemporal resolution and accuracy, which would represent a clinically-convenient single-breathhold protocol. However, acceleration using conventional parallel imaging (PI) decreases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) [
16] and may compromise the accuracy of the displacement and strain measurements.
Compressed sensing is a newer technique that is making a major impact on accelerated CMR [
17] and which, when combined with PI, may preserve the accuracy of cine DENSE displacement and strain measurements when acceleration is employed. In CS, high-quality images can be recovered from data sampled well below the Nyquist rate provided that the sampling pattern is incoherent, the images are sparse in a transform domain, and a sparsity-promoting iterative reconstruction is used [
17]. Cine DENSE imaging may be well-suited for acceleration using CS since the data present spatiotemporal sparsity and there are correlations between data encoded for displacement in different directions. The purposes of the present study were to develop CS-PI-accelerated acquisition and reconstruction methods for cine DENSE, to assess their accuracy for measuring myocardial displacement and strain, and to demonstrate the feasibility of these methods for acquiring high-quality prospectively-accelerated 2D cine DENSE images in a single breathhold.