Cardiac phase-resolved late gadolinium enhancement imaging

Cardiac phase-resolved late gadolinium enhancement imaging

Weingärtner, S.D. (TU Delft ImPhys/Computational Imaging; TU Delft ImPhys/Medical Imaging)
Demirel, Omer Burak (University of Minnesota)
Gama, Francisco. (St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London)
Pierce, Iain (St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London)
Treibel, Thomas A. (St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London; University College London (UCL))
Schulz-Menger, Jeanette (Charite-Medical University Berlin; HELIOS Klinikum Berlin-Buch and DZHK, Berlin)
Akcakaya, Mehmet (University of Minnesota)

2022

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.

cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR
T1 mapping
LGE imaging
myocardial tissue characterization
magnetic resonance imaging
MRI sequence development

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:637e09f3-ba40-4fe9-ad53-8414261a4596

https://doi.org/10.3389/fcvm.2022.917180

2297-055X

Frontiers in Cardiovasculair Medicine, 9

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 S.D. Weingärtner, Omer Burak Demirel, Francisco. Gama, Iain Pierce, Thomas A. Treibel, Jeanette Schulz-Menger, Mehmet Akcakaya