Multicontrast late gadolinium enhancement imaging enables viability and wall motion assessment in a single acquisition with reduced scan times.
OBJECTIVE
To determine the accuracy of multicontrast late enhancement imaging (MCLE) in the assessment of myocardial viability and wall motion compared to the conventional wall motion and viability cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pulse sequences.


METHODS
Forty-one patients with suspected myocardial infarction were studied. Patients underwent assessment of cardiac function with cine steady-state free-precession (SSFP), followed by late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) imaging using inversion recovery gradient echo scanning (IR-GRE) sequence and MCLE. MCLE was compared to cine SSFP in the assessment of wall motion, ejection fraction (EF), left ventricular (LV) mass, LV end-diastolic volume (EDV), and to IR-GRE for measuring infarct size.


RESULTS
MCLE, IR-GRE, and SSFP imaging demonstrated excellent agreement in the assessment of EF, LV infarct size, and LV mass (r > 0.95, P < 0.001 for all measures), as well as in the assessment of wall motion (kappa statistic 0.75).


CONCLUSIONS
MCLE provided coregistered images for the assessment of viability and wall motion without loss of accuracy in the assessment of quantitative cardiac parameters. MCLE provides accurate quantitative cardiac assessment with reduced scan times compared to the conventional sequences and thus may be used as an alternative to conventional cine SSFP and IR-GRE imaging.
Imaging Research, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. connellyk@smh.toronto.on.ca
Kim A
KA
Connelly
Jay S
JS
Detsky
John J
JJ
Graham
Gideon
G
Paul
Ram
R
Vijayaragavan
Alexander J
AJ
Dick
Graham A
GA
Wright
D000368:Aged; D003287:Contrast Media; D005260:Female; D019786:Gadolinium DTPA; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D019028:Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Cine / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009203:Myocardial Infarction / Q000175:diagnosis*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
D003287:Contrast Media; D019786:Gadolinium DTPA