A novel functional LGE imaging method achieved thorough suppression of healthy myocardium and 40-80ms temporal resolution, demonstrating robust hyperenhancement in scar areas across all cardiac phases.
Does a novel functional LGE imaging method enable simultaneous assessment of cardiac function and focal fibrosis in a single breath-hold?
The proposed functional LGE technique enables simultaneous assessment of cardiac function and viability in a single breath-hold, potentially simplifying CMR protocols.
Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CMR) is a central tool for diagnosis of various ischemic and non-ischemic cardiomyopathies. CMR protocols commonly comprise assessment of functional properties using cardiac phase-resolved CINE MRI and characterization of myocardial viability using late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) imaging. Conventional LGE imaging requires inversion recovery preparation with a specific inversion time to null the healthy myocardium, which restricts the acquisition to a single cardiac phase. In turn, this necessitates separate scans for cardiac function and viability. In this work, we develop a new method for functional LGE imaging in a single breath-hold using a three-step approach: 1) ECG-triggered multi-contrast data is acquired for each cardiac phase, 2) semi-quantitative relaxation maps are generated, 3) LGE imaging contrast is synthesized based on the semi-quantitative maps. The proposed functional LGE method is evaluated in four healthy subject and 20 patients at 1.5T and 3T. Thorough suppression of the healthy myocardium, as well as 40-80ms temporal resolution are achieved, with no visually apparent temporal blurring at tissue interfaces. Functional LGE in patients with focal scar demonstrates robust hyperenhancement in the scar area throughout all cardiac phases, allowing for visual assessment of scar motility. The proposed technique bears the potential to simplify and speedup common cardiac imaging protocols, while enabling improved data fusion of functional and viability information for improved evaluation of CMR.
Weingärtner et al. (Mon,) conducted a other in Focal scar (n=24). Functional LGE imaging was evaluated on Suppression of healthy myocardium and temporal resolution. A novel functional LGE imaging method achieved thorough suppression of healthy myocardium and 40-80ms temporal resolution, demonstrating robust hyperenhancement in scar areas across all cardiac phases.