The development of transfusion related iron overload in the tissue of myocardium can result in cardiomyopathy [
1,
2], and heart failure remains the leading cause of death in beta-thalassemia major (TM) [
3,
4]. Myocardial iron measurement is important for assessing the risk of cardiac complications [
5,
6], because of the frequency of myocardial siderosis in thalassemia major [
2], and the benefit of tailoring appropriate iron-chelating treatment [
7‐
10].
Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) provides a non-invasive means of measuring the amount of tissue iron. With CMR, the iron deposition results in shortening of proton relaxation times and both T2 and T2* measurements have been exploited to assess iron overload [
7,
11]. Myocardial T2* is fast and simple to implement and has demonstrated good reproducibility in assessing tissue iron content [
12‐
14]. A similar T2 sequence, however, is technically more difficult, and early attempts at implementation were unsatisfactory for myocardial iron measurements due to problems associated with hardware constraints, flow, cardiac motion, and noise [
15,
16]. However, T2 is known to vary with myocardial iron [
17,
18], and there may be potential advantages of T2 over T2* for the avoidance of problems caused by factors such as shimming and local susceptibility. There is also interest in comparing the myocardial T2* with T2 to discover if additional useful clinical information can be gleaned as to the chemical state of the stored iron. For this purpose, a breath-hold T2 technique has been developed and recently reported [
19]. This T2 technique has demonstrated good interstudy reproducibility in London. However, in order to be applicable in healthcare on a wider scale, its transferability between scanners of different centers must be established, but no data on this challenging issue is available to date. We now describe the results of the transfer of this technique to different scanners at 4 different centers in different countries.