Weingärtner Sebastian, Demirel Ömer B, Gama Francisco, Pierce Iain, Treibel Thomas A, Schulz-Menger Jeanette, Akçakaya Mehmet
Department of Imaging Physics, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States.
Front Cardiovasc Med. 2022 Sep 29;9:917180. doi: 10.3389/fcvm.2022.917180. eCollection 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 weighting. (2) Generation of semi-quantitative 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%. 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.
心脏磁共振成像（CMR）的延迟钆增强（LGE）是评估心肌瘢痕和局灶性纤维化的临床参考标准。然而，目前的LGE技术仅限于对单个心动周期进行成像，这妨碍了对瘢痕运动性的评估，并且不允许在多个心动周期之间进行交叉比较。在这项研究中，我们研究了一种三步法来获取心动周期分辨的LGE图像：（1）采集具有不同加权的心动周期分辨成像数据。（2）为每个心动周期生成半定量图。（3）合成LGE对比剂以获得功能性LGE图像。该方法在体模成像、6名3T的健康受试者和20名1.5T的患者中进行了评估。3T的体模成像显示在整个心动周期中对比度一致，变异系数为2.55±0.42%。结果表明，在健康受试者中，LGE对比可靠，心肌组织得到充分抑制。在健康受试者中，血液与心肌之间的对比度在整个心动周期中呈现中等程度的变化（变异系数为18.2±3.51%）。分别在3T和1.5T下，以40 - 60毫秒和80毫秒的时间分辨率采集图像。在心肌瘢痕患者中获取的功能性LGE图像在整个心动周期中均能显示瘢痕组织，尽管其成像分辨率和噪声耐受性明显低于参考技术。所提出的技术有望整合心动周期分辨CMR与LGE成像的优势，但为了临床应用，仍需进一步提高采集质量。
