Motivation: Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac MRI is the non-invasive gold standard for detecting myocardial scars and fibrosis. However, it has limitations, including incomplete myocardial nulling and sensitivity to motion. Goal(s): To develop a high-resolution synthetic LGE method based on accelerated post-contrast T1 mapping to address these limitations. Approach: We compared the proposed method with regular-resolution synthetic LGE and conventional LGE in a cohort of 50 patients with suspected cardiomyopathy. Results: The proposed method reduces artifacts, enhances myocardial nulling, improves overall image quality, and achieves an accuracy for assessing myocardial scar comparable to that of conventional LGE. Impact: The proposed method can achieve a similar accuracy in assessing myocardial scar relative to conventional LGE, while offering superior image quality, improved myocardial nulling, and an ability to simultaneously detect focal and diffuse fibrosis.
Gao et al. (Tue,) studied this question.