Cardiac phase-resolved late gadolinium enhancement imaging.

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Imaging
• Medical Physics
• Cardiac MRI

Background:

• Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) using cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is the gold standard for myocardial scar assessment.
• Current LGE techniques capture only a single cardiac phase, limiting the evaluation of scar motility and inter-phase comparisons.
• Assessing scar dynamics is crucial for understanding myocardial function and disease progression.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a novel three-step approach for acquiring cardiac phase-resolved LGE images.
• To enable functional assessment of myocardial scar by visualizing scar tissue movement throughout the cardiac cycle.
• To investigate the feasibility of integrating phase-resolved imaging with LGE for enhanced diagnostic capabilities.

Main Methods:

• Acquisition of cardiac phase-resolved imaging data with variable T1 weighting.
• Generation of semi-quantitative T1 maps for each cardiac phase.
• Synthesization of LGE contrast to create functional LGE images, evaluated in phantoms and human subjects (healthy and patients) at 3T and 1.5T.

Main Results:

• Phantom imaging demonstrated consistent LGE contrast throughout the cardiac cycle (CV 2.55 ± 0.42%).
• In vivo studies showed reliable LGE contrast and myocardial suppression in healthy subjects, with moderate blood-myocardium contrast variation (CV 18.2 ± 3.51%).
• Functional LGE images in patients visualized scar tissue throughout the cardiac cycle, though with lower resolution and noise resilience compared to conventional LGE.

Conclusions:

• The proposed technique successfully generates cardiac phase-resolved LGE images, offering potential for assessing scar motility.
• This method integrates the benefits of phase-resolved CMR with LGE imaging.
• Further advancements in acquisition quality are necessary for widespread clinical adoption.