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MRI Post-Processing Methods for Myocardial Infarct Quantification

  • New Imaging Technologies (U J Schoepf, Section Editor)
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Abstract

Myocardial infarct (MI) size has been increasingly used as an endpoint in multiple clinical trials and has thus become an important clinical measure. While late gadolinium enhancement MRI is considered the clinical reference standard to detect, characterize, and quantify MI, there is no established universal quantification algorithm that provides reliable MI assessment in every scenario. Efforts have been made to improve the binary threshold-based methods which dichotomize MRI voxels as either healthy or infarcted. Novel algorithms have also been proposed to quantify the actual infarcted tissue content of each MRI voxel while accounting for partial volume averaging, a common issue in quantitative MRI. Currently, the full-width at half-maximum binary algorithm seems to have the highest accuracy and reproducibility. Non-binary algorithms show comparable results; however, the literature is limited in terms of their clinical feasibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Cardiovascular Imaging, Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Medical University of South Carolina, 25 Courtenay Drive, MSC 226, Charleston, SC, 29425-2260, USA

    Akos Varga-Szemes, U. Joseph Schoepf, Carlo N. De Cecco, Christian Tesche, Stephen R. Fuller & Pal Suranyi

  2. Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Rob J. van der Geest

  3. Department of Cardiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Heart Center Munich-Bogenhausen, Munich, Germany

    Christian Tesche

  4. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

    Gabriel A. Elgavish

Authors
  1. Akos Varga-Szemes
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  3. U. Joseph Schoepf
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  4. Carlo N. De Cecco
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to U. Joseph Schoepf.

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Conflict of Interest

Akos Varga-Szemes reports personal fees from Guerbet. U. Joseph Schoepf reports grants from Siemens Healthcare, Bayer, Bracco, GE Healthcare, Medrad, and Astellas; personal fees from Siemens Healthcare and Guerbet; and non-financial support from Siemens Healthcare, Bayer, GE Healthcare, and Medrad. Dr. Schoepf is a section editor for Current Radiology Reports. Carlo N. De Cecco reports personal fees from Guerbet. Gabriel A. Elgavish is an Officer for Elgavish Paramagnetics Inc. Pal Suranyi reports non-financial support from Siemens Healthcare, Bayer, and GE Healthcare. Rob J van der Geest, Christian Tesche, and Stephen R. Fuller each declare no potential conflicts of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human subjects performed by any of the authors. Some figures in this manuscript were prepared using animal research data for which approval from institutional animal care committee was obtained.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on New Imaging Technologies.

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Varga-Szemes, A., van der Geest, R.J., Schoepf, U.J. et al. MRI Post-Processing Methods for Myocardial Infarct Quantification. Curr Radiol Rep 4, 30 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40134-016-0159-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40134-016-0159-7

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