Early assessment of infarct size by feature tracking cardiac MRI in patients with myocardial infarction

Background The degree and quantification of contractile dysfunction and myocardial scar in patients after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has important prognostic implications. Myocardial deformation parameters like strain and strain rate have been shown to be more sensitive markers for contractile dysfunction than standard 2-D parameters. We sought to investigate whether strain and strain rate imaging, assessed by a novel non-invasive post-processing feature tracking algorithm (FTI) on pre-acquired regular CMR SSFP images, would allow quantification of regional left ventricular (LV) function and its relation to degrees of infarct trans-murality in patients after AMI.