Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance

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BACKGROUND: Diastolic left ventricular dysfunction is a powerful contributor to the symptoms and prognosis of patients with heart failure. In patients with depressed left ventricular systolic function the EA ratio is the first step to defining the grade of diastolic dysfunction. Doppler echocardiography is the preferred imaging technique for diastolic function assessment, while CMR is less established as a method. Previous 4D Flow-based studies have looked at the EA ratio proximally to the mitral valve, requiring manual interaction...

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has become the reference standard for quantitative and qualitative assessment of ventricular function, blood flow, and myocardial tissue characterization. There is a preponderance of large CMR studies and registries in adults; However, similarly powered studies are lacking for the pediatric and congenital heart disease (PCHD) population. To date, most CMR studies in children are limited to small single or multicenter studies, thereby limiting the conclusions that can be drawn...

BACKGROUND: Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) of the myocardium has significant diagnostic and prognostic implications, with even small areas of enhancement being important. Distinguishing between definitely normal and definitely abnormal LGE images is usually straightforward; but diagnostic uncertainty arises when reporters are not sure whether the observed LGE is genuine or not. This uncertainty might be resolved by repetition (to remove artefact) or further acquisition of intersecting images, but this must take place before the scan finishes...

BACKGROUND: MRI is an important imaging modality for the assessment and management of adult patients with congenital heart disease (CHD). However, conventional techniques for 3D whole-heart acquisition involve long and unpredictable scan times and methods that accelerate scans via k-space undersampling often rely on long iterative reconstructions. Deep-learning-based reconstruction methods have recently attracted much interest due to their capacity to provide fast reconstructions whilst often outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods...

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has established itself as the gold standard for serial assessment of systemic right ventricular (RV) performance but due to the lack of standardized RV reference values for HLHS patients, the interpretation of RV volumetric data in HLHS remains difficult. Therefore, this study aimed to close this gap by providing CMR reference values for the systemic RV in HLHS patients. METHODS: CMR scans of 160 children, adolescents and young adults (age range 2...

BACKGROUND: Free-running cardiac and respiratory motion-resolved whole-heart 5D MRI can reduce scan planning and provide a means of evaluating respiratory-driven changes in clinical parameters of interest. However, respiratory-resolved imaging can be limited by user-defined parameters which create trade-offs between residual artifact and motion blur. In this work, we develop and validate strategies for both correction of intra-bin and compensation of inter-bin respiratory motion to improve the quality of 5D MRI...

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to evaluate cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) findings and their relationship to longer-term clinical outcomes in patients with suspected myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination. METHODS: Consecutive adult patients who underwent clinically indicated CMR for evaluation of suspected myocarditis following mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination at a single center between 2021-2022 were retrospectively evaluated. Patients were classified based on the revised Lake Louise criteria for T1-based abnormalities (late gadolinium enhancement or high T1 values) and T2-based abnormalities (regional T2-hyperintensity or high T2 values)...

BACKGROUND: Patients are increasingly using Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) to better understand their own radiology findings. PURPOSE: To evaluate the performance of GPT-4 in transforming cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) reports into text comprehensible for medical laypersons. MATERIALS AND METHODS: ChatGPT with GPT-4 architecture was used to generate three different explained versions of 20 various CMR reports using the same prompt "Explain the radiology report in a language understandable to a medical layperson" (n=60)...

BACKGROUND: Left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is the most commonly clinically used imaging parameter for assessing cancer therapy-related cardiac dysfunction (CTRCD). However, LVEF declines may occur late, after substantial injury. This study sought to investigate cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging markers of subclinical cardiac injury in a miniature swine model. METHODS: Female Yucatan miniature swine (n=14) received doxorubicin (2mg/kg) every 3 weeks for 4 cycles...

BACKGROUND: Identification of increased pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP) by right heart catheterisation (RHC) is the reference standard for the diagnosis of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Recently, cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging estimation of PCWP at rest was introduced as a non-invasive alternative. Since many patients are only identified during physiological exercise-stress we hypothesised that novel exercise-stress CMR derived PCWP emerges superior compared to its assessment at rest...

BACKGROUND: Automatic myocardial scar segmentation from late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) images using neural networks promises an alternative to time-consuming and observer-dependent semi-automatic approaches. However, alterations in data acquisition, reconstruction as well as post-processing may compromise network performance. The objective of the present work was to systematically assess network performance degradation due to a mismatch of point-spread function between training and testing data...

BACKGROUND: Ascending thoracic aortic aneurysm (ATAA) is a silent and threatening dilation of the ascending aorta (AscAo). Maximal aortic diameter which is currently used for ATAA patients management and surgery planning has been shown to inadequately characterize risk of dissection in a large proportion of patients. Our aim was to propose a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of aortic morphology and pressure-flow-wall associations from 4D flow MRI data in healthy aging and in patients with ATAA...

BACKGROUND: Identification of risk factors for biventricular (BiV) repair in children with hypoplastic left ventricles (HLV) has been challenging. We sought to identify preoperative cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) predictors of outcome in patients with HLVs who underwent BiV repair, with a focus on the mitral valve (MV). METHODS: Single center retrospective analysis of preoperative CMRs on patients with HLV (≤50ml/m2 ) and no endocardial fibroelastosis who underwent BiV repair from 2005-2022...

BACKGROUND: The 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is a standard diagnostic tool for monitoring cardiac ischemia and heart rhythm during cardiac interventional procedures and stress testing. These procedures can benefit from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) information; however, the MRI scanner magnetic field leads to ECG distortion that limits ECG interpretation. This study evaluated the potential for improved ECG interpretation in a "low field" 0.55T MRI scanner. METHODS: 12-lead ECGs were recorded inside 0...

BACKGROUND: The presence of myocardial scar is associated with poor prognosis in several underlying diseases. Late-gadolinium-enhancement (LGE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging reveals clinically silent "unrecognized myocardial scar" (UMS), but the etiology of UMS often remains unclear. This population-based CMR study evaluated prevalence, localization, patterns and risk factors of UMS. METHODS: The study population consisted of 1064 consecutive Hamburg City Health study participants without a history of coronary heart disease or myocarditis...

BACKGROUND: Quantitative CMR first pass perfusion maps are conventionally acquired with 3 short-axis views (basal, mid and apical) in every heartbeat (3SAX/1RR). Thus, a significant part of the LV myocardium, including the apex, is not covered. The aims of this study were 1) to investigate if perfusion maps acquired with 3 short-axis views sampled every other RR-interval (2RR) yield comparable quantitative measures of myocardial perfusion (MP) as 1RR and 2) to assess if acquiring 3 additional perfusion views (i...

BACKGROUND: 4D flow MRI often relies on the injection of gadolinium- or iron-oxide-based contrast agents to improve vessel delineation. In this work, a novel technique is developed to acquire and reconstruct 4D flow data with excellent dynamic visualization of blood vessels but without the need for contrast injection. Synchronization of Neighboring Acquisitions by Physiological Signals (SyNAPS) uses Pilot Tone (PT) navigation to retrospectively synchronize the reconstruction of two free-running 3D radial acquisitions, to create co-registered anatomy and flow images...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

BACKGROUND: The prognostic value of left ventricular (LV) myocardial trabecular complexity on cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) remains unknown. This study aimed to evaluate the prognostic value of LV myocardial trabecular complexity using fractal analysis in patients with DCM. METHODS: Consecutive patients with DCM who underwent CMR between March 2017 and November 2021 at two hospitals were prospectively enrolled. The primary endpoints were defined as the combination of all-cause death and heart failure hospitalization...