Cardiac amyloidosis: diagnosis using delayed enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance imaging sequences.

Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is very useful in distinguishing between myocardial infarction, in which the enhancement is typically subendocardial, and myocarditis, in which it is subepicardial (Figure 1). In addition, various patterns have been described with different cardiomyopathies, in some cases enabling a specific diagnosis without invasive workup and risk stratification. Cardiac amyloidosis was previously thought to be present only when systemic amyloidosis was patently manifest. This has proved not to be the case, with cardiac MRI detecting increasing numbers of cases in patients with diastolic heart failure in whom cardiac