Semi-automatic segmentation of myocardium at risk from contrast enhanced SSFP images - validation against manual delineation and SPECT

Background The development of treatments to limit myocardial injury in patients with acute STEMI is dependent on methods that accurately determine the amount of mycoardium at risk (MaR). Both T2-weighted imaging and contrast enhanced SSFP (CE-SSFP) have been validated against SPECT and can determine the MaR by CMR one week after an infarct. CE-SSFP has recently been used in two multi-center studies 1,2 . An automatic algorithm for quantification of MaR from T2-weighted images has previously been described but not been tested in CE-SSFP. The aim of this study was to further develop and validate this automatic method for CE-SSFP. Methods