Background Arrhythmia and heart rate variability have adverse effects on the image quality of Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE). Due to the incomplete recovery after an inversion pulse, changes in the RR-interval length induce a k-space weighting, which results in ghosting artifacts in the images. While the impact of heart-rate variability is less pronounced in 2D LGE due to short scan times (1...

Background Subendocardial LGE is a marker of ischemic aetiology of left ventricular dysfunction, and of viable myocardium. Using a high relaxivity contrast media such as gadobenate dimeglumine, however, little areas of subendocardial LGE can be masked by the high signal of the blood pool. We halved the optimal TI to null the signal of viable myocardium to obtain LGE images with high signal from...

Background Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) by cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is a common finding in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), and its extent correlates with clinical parameters such as ventricular tachycardia and sudden cardiac death. While LGE has been shown to reflect focal replacement fibrosis, recently optimized T1 mapping techniques have allowed for the quantific...

Background The late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) technique has been an important achievement in cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) and is widely used to precisely localize and determine the amount of necrosis and fibrosis. The percentage of transmurality of LGE is inversely related to the likelihood of functional recovery after revascularisation. LGE imaging is usually performed in enddias...

Background Left ventricular late gadolinium enhancement (LV-LGE) is a known incidental cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) finding in atrial fibrillation (AF) patients and has recently been associated with increased mortality [1]. While LV-LGE is an indicator of poor prognosis in patients with cardiomyopathy, data on the clinical significance of incidental findings of LV-LGE in AF patients is stil...

BACKGROUND Both high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T and B-type natriuretic peptide are useful in detecting myocardial fibrosis, as determined by late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR), in patients with non-obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. However, their values to predict myocardial fibrosis in hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy (HOCM) remain uncle...

BACKGROUND Despite the established role of late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) in characterizing chronic myocardial infarction (MI), a significant portion of chronic MI patients are contraindicative for the use of contrast agents. One promising alternative contrast free technique is diffusion weighted CMR (dwCMR), which has been shown ex vivo to be sensitiv...

BACKGROUND Regional contractile dysfunction is a frequent finding in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). We aimed to investigate the contribution of different tissue characteristics in HCM to regional contractile dysfunction. METHODS We prospectively recruited 50 patients with HCM who underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) studies at 3.0 T including cine imaging, T1 mapping and late...

Recent evidence suggests that projection neurons and interneurons of the cerebral cortex are generally derived from distinct proliferative zones. Cortical projection neurons originate from the cortical ventricular zone (VZ), and then migrate radially into the cortical mantle, whereas most cortical interneurons originate from the basal telencephalon and migrate tangentially into the developing c...

BACKGROUND The factors that predict recovery of left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction among patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) are not completely understood. Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) of the LV has been reported among patients with AF, and we aimed to test whether the presence LGE was associated with subsequent recovery of LV systolic function among patients with AF and LV dysf...