A Comparative Study of Different CMR Methods for Detecting Myocardial Edema Associated with Acute Myocardial Infarction

Introduction: A number of CMR imaging approaches have been proposed for detecting myocardial edema accompanying acute myocardial infarctions (AMI). T1 [1] and T2 [2] maps, T2-prepared SSFP [3] and cine SSFP (bSSFP) [4,5] are potential alternatives to the most commonly employed T2-weighted STIR (T2-STIR) [6] imaging. However, the relative sensitivities of the various approaches in relation to the routinely used T2-STIR method is not fully known. This work aims to assess the sensitivity of T1 and T2 maps, as well as T2-prep SSFP and bSSFP methods against T2-STIR, in detecting myocardial edema using an animal model with AMI.