TY - JOUR
T1 - Cardiac phase-resolved late gadolinium enhancement imaging
AU - Weingärtner, S.D.
AU - Demirel, Omer Burak
AU - Gama, Francisco.
AU - Pierce, Iain
AU - Treibel, Thomas A.
AU - Schulz-Menger, Jeanette
AU - Akcakaya, Mehmet
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) with cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is the clinical reference for assessment of myocardial scar and focal fibrosis. However, current LGE techniques are confined to imaging of a single cardiac phase, which hampers assessment of scar motility and does not allow cross-comparison between multiple phases. In this work, we investigate a three step approach to obtain cardiac phase-resolved LGE images: (1) Acquisition of cardiac phase-resolved imaging data with varying T1 weighting. (2) Generation of semi-quantitative T*1 maps for each cardiac phase. (3) Synthetization of LGE contrast to obtain functional LGE images. The proposed method is evaluated in phantom imaging, six healthy subjects at 3T and 20 patients at 1.5T. Phantom imaging at 3T demonstrates consistent contrast throughout the cardiac cycle with a coefficient of variation of 2.55 ± 0.42%. In-vivo results show reliable LGE contrast with thorough suppression of the myocardial tissue is healthy subjects. The contrast between blood and myocardium showed moderate variation throughout the cardiac cycle in healthy subjects (coefficient of variation 18.2 ± 3.51%). Images were acquired at 40–60 ms and 80 ms temporal resolution, at 3T and 1.5, respectively. Functional LGE images acquired in patients with myocardial scar visualized scar tissue throughout the cardiac cycle, albeit at noticeably lower imaging resolution and noise resilience than the reference technique. The proposed technique bears the promise of integrating the advantages of phase-resolved CMR with LGE imaging, but further improvements in the acquisition quality are warranted for clinical use.
AB - Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) with cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is the clinical reference for assessment of myocardial scar and focal fibrosis. However, current LGE techniques are confined to imaging of a single cardiac phase, which hampers assessment of scar motility and does not allow cross-comparison between multiple phases. In this work, we investigate a three step approach to obtain cardiac phase-resolved LGE images: (1) Acquisition of cardiac phase-resolved imaging data with varying T1 weighting. (2) Generation of semi-quantitative T*1 maps for each cardiac phase. (3) Synthetization of LGE contrast to obtain functional LGE images. The proposed method is evaluated in phantom imaging, six healthy subjects at 3T and 20 patients at 1.5T. Phantom imaging at 3T demonstrates consistent contrast throughout the cardiac cycle with a coefficient of variation of 2.55 ± 0.42%. In-vivo results show reliable LGE contrast with thorough suppression of the myocardial tissue is healthy subjects. The contrast between blood and myocardium showed moderate variation throughout the cardiac cycle in healthy subjects (coefficient of variation 18.2 ± 3.51%). Images were acquired at 40–60 ms and 80 ms temporal resolution, at 3T and 1.5, respectively. Functional LGE images acquired in patients with myocardial scar visualized scar tissue throughout the cardiac cycle, albeit at noticeably lower imaging resolution and noise resilience than the reference technique. The proposed technique bears the promise of integrating the advantages of phase-resolved CMR with LGE imaging, but further improvements in the acquisition quality are warranted for clinical use.
KW - cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR
KW - T1 mapping
KW - LGE imaging
KW - myocardial tissue characterization
KW - magnetic resonance imaging
KW - MRI sequence development
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139855533&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fcvm.2022.917180
DO - 10.3389/fcvm.2022.917180
M3 - Article
SN - 2297-055X
VL - 9
JO - Frontiers in Cardiovasculair Medicine
JF - Frontiers in Cardiovasculair Medicine
M1 - 917180
ER -