High-Resolution MR Characterization of Myocardial Infarction using Compressed Sensing with Edge Preservation

Background Characterization of infarct heterogeneity can inform therapeutic strategies for ventricular tachycardia and the management of patients with prior myocardial infarction (MI). Multi-contrast late-enhancement (MCLE) images along the signal-relaxation curve, acquired in a breath-hold ECG-gated scan, offer better visualization of MI than conventional IR-FGRE. However, current MR images either with IR-FGRE or MCLE provide an inferior spatial resolution of 1.6-2.0 mm in-plane with a slice thickness of 5-8 mm in the clinical setting, which is not sufficient to properly delineate infarct heterogeneity. This work presents a three-dimensional MCLE sequence accelerated using variable density Poisson-disk sampling and also proposes a novel reconstruction method using Compressed Sensing with Edge Preservation (COSEP), achieving an in-vivo isotropic resolution of 1.5 mm within a single breath-hold.