One-stop Diagnosis of Ischemic Heart Disease Using Cardiac MRI

ABSTRACT

Recently, MRI has achieved many technical advances in the spatial resolution, temporal resolution, signaltonoise ratio, and postprocessing software. As a result, cardiac MRI has made a sudden rise from old obscurity in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. Cardiac MRI may be a onestopshop solution for the assessment of systolic dysfunction, perfusion impairment and myocardial viability, and for the imaging of stenosed artery. The evaluation of myocardial ischemia and viability are very important in the decision of therapeutic strategy and the anticipation of the prognosis of the patients with ischemic heart disease. At one session of examination, MRI can provide combined information on myocardial contractile function and myocardial perfusion, and unique information on the transmural extent of delayed hyper-enhancement. Delayed hyperenhancement on contrastenhanced MRI is highly reproducible irrespective of the scanning procedure and the operator, which is used for the interpretation of myocardial viability in the patients with myocardial infarction. Cardiac MRI is a very accurate and costeffective modality for the evaluation of ischemic heart disease.