Myocardial strain in healthy adults across a broad age range as revealed by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging at 1.5 and 3.0T: Associations of myocardial strain with myocardial region, age, and sex

Abstract

PurposeTo assess myocardial strain using cine displacement encoding with stimulated echoes (DENSE) using 1.5T and 3.0T MRI in healthy adults.Materials and MethodsHealthy adults without any history of cardiovascular disease underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 1.5T and 3.0T within 2 days. The MRI protocol included balanced steady‐state free‐precession (b‐SSFP), 2D cine‐echo planar imaging (EPI)‐DENSE, and late gadolinium enhancement in subjects >45 years. Acquisitions were divided into six segments; global and segmental peak longitudinal and circumferential strain were derived and analyzed by field strength, age, and gender.ResultsIn all, 89 volunteers (mean age 44.8 ± 18.0 years, range: 18–87 years) underwent MRI at 1.5T, and 88 of these subjects underwent MRI at 3.0T (1.4 ± 1.4 days between the scans). Compared with 3.0T, the magnitudes of global circumferential (–19.5 ± 2.6% vs. –18.47 ± 2.6%; P = 0.001) and longitudinal (–12.47 ± 3.2% vs. –10.53 ± 3.1%; P = 0.004) strain were greater at 1.5T. At 1.5T, longitudinal strain was greater in females than in males: –10.17 ± 3.4% vs. –13.67 ± 2.4%; P = 0.001. Similar observations occurred for circumferential strain at 1.5T (–18.72 ± 2.2% vs. –20.10 ± 2.7%; P = 0.014) and at 3.0T (–17.92 ± 1.8% vs. –19.1 ± 3.1%; P = 0.047). At 1.5T, longitudinal and circumferential strain were not associated with age after accounting for sex (longitudinal strain P = 0.178, circumferential strain P = 0.733). At 3.0T, longitudinal and circumferential strain were associated with age (P < 0.05). Longitudinal strain values were greater in the apico‐septal, basal‐lateral, and mid‐lateral segments and circumferential strain in the inferior, infero‐lateral, and antero‐lateral LV segments.ConclusionMyocardial strain parameters as revealed by cine‐DENSE at different MRI field strengths were associated with myocardial region, age, and sex. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2016;44:1197–1205.

A Novel Method for Estimating Myocardial Strain: Assessment of Deformation Tracking Against Reference Magnetic Resonance Methods in Healthy Volunteers

“…Deformation-tracking identified a sex difference in strain as previously reported using DENSE25, i.e. that females may generate larger magnitudes of circumferential strain.…”

“…Image analysis is as previously described25. The imaging datasets were anonymised to ensure that the imaging analysts were blinded to all other data.…”

“…DENSE data were analysed using the CIM_DENSE2D software (University of Auckland, New Zealand)35 as previously described25. K.M and G.C.…”

Decreased biventricular longitudinal strain in patients with systemic sclerosis is mainly caused by pulmonary hypertension and not by systemic sclerosis per se

“…CMR data were analysed from 65 patients diagnosed with SSc, whereof 40 without PAH and 25 with PAH. Nineteen healthy controls, from earlier studies in our group (Steding et al, 2010;Bodetoft et al, 2011;Gyllenhammar et al, 2018), were matched with the patient population for gender and age (Mangion et al, 2016). Controls had no reported morbidities, including arterial hypertension, diabetes or coronary artery disease, no medical history or medication, and were checked by clinicians before entering the study.…”

MRI in cardio‐oncology: A review of cardiac complications in oncologic care

“…Mangion et al showed that global cine‐strain measurements offer good reproducibility, whereas regional strain is less reproducible . Additionally, myocardial strain parameters are associated with age and sex, which suggests analysis of strain should account for these differences . Figures show circumferential and radial strain calculations with both global and segmental approaches utilizing feature tracking.…”