Clinical validation of susceptibility-weighted cardiovascular magnetic resonance in comparison to T2 and T2* imaging for detection of intramyocardial hemorrhage following acute myocardial infarction

Background Intramyocardial hemorrhage (IMH) identified by CMR is an established prognostic marker following acute myocardial infarction (AMI), but remains relatively underused in the clinical setting. Detection of IMH by T2-weighted or T2* CMR can be limited by long breath hold times and sensitivity to artefacts, especially at 3 Tesla. Alternative methods that can detect IMH with shorter breath hold times are therefore desirable. CMR is capable of detecting differences in the magnetic susceptibility of tissues. The paramagnetic properties of hemoglobin products within IMH cause local phase shifts relative to surrounding tissue. Phase data can be filtered and combined with magnitude data to generate susceptibility weighted MR images (SW MRI). SW imaging has been shown to be highly sensitive for the detection of cerebral hemorrhage, but typically uses long echo times, resulting in prolonged image acquisition. With the larger size of IMH, we hypothesized that SW MRI may be used with shorter echo times, leading to rapid imaging with breath hold times of approximately 4 seconds. We compared the image quality and diagnostic ability of this SW MRI pulse sequence with T2-weighted and T2* CMR to detect IMH at 3T. Methods