Application value of cardiac magnetic resonance image fusion technique in patients with acute myocardial infarction

Abstract

Background: Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is feasible for detecting acute myocardial edema in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). However, cardiac motion artifacts can cause severe attenuation or loss of DWI signal in well-contracting myocardial segments. Our study aimed to investigate the application value of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image fusion technique in patients with AMI. Methods: Patients with AMI who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention and CMR were prospectively enrolled. Image fusion was performed on cardiac cine imaging and DWI. Using late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) as the reference standard, the acute myocardial edema diagnostic efficiency, image quality score and correlation with infarct size were compared between DWI and cine-DWI. Results: A total of 52 patients with AMI were enrolled in this study. No significant difference was found in the positive rate of acute myocardial edema diagnosis between DWI and cine-DWI (92.3% vs. 96.2%, p = 0.500). Cine-DWI had higher normal and overall myocardial scores than DWI (all p < 0.001); no significant difference was observed in edematous myocardial score between DWI and cine-DWI (p = 0.239). The correlation coefficient r between the edema area measured using DWI and the infarct size measured using LGE was 0.826 (p< 0.001); and the correlation coefficient r between the edema area measured using cine-DWI and the infarct size measured using LGE was 0.905 (p< 0.001) . Conclusions: Compared with DWI, the fusion image base on cine and DWI improved the image quality, and its edema area had a stronger correlation with the infarct size measured using LGE.