Comparison of cardiac DWI with and without ZOOM by using second-order motion compensated spin echo for healthy control and HCM patients

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a hereditary cardiomyopathy with a relatively high rate of sudden death. Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is widely used for evaluating motion of water protons as one of the functional magnetic resonance imaging methods. Second-order motion-compensated spin echo (M2SE) has been applied for cardiac DWI, but there are few reports of M2SE combined with ZOOM for HCM. The results showed that both signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of ZOOM-M2SE were significantly higher than those of M2SE only, and the ADC value of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was also significantly higher than that of healthy controls. Cardiac DWI using ZOOM-M2SE would be a more appropriate method for investigating the myocardial microenvironment in healthy and HCM subjects.