Normalized Cardiac MRI Summaries to Enable Inter-Patient and Longitudinal Intra-Patient Comparison

• Activity Number: 441
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Imaging
• Author(s): Vadim Zipunnikov*+
• Companies: Johns Hopkins University
• Keywords: LGE-MRI ; longitudinal data

Abstract

Late gadolinium enhancement on magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) can noninvasively estimate the extent of myocardium scar in left atrium (LA) of heart. This opens up unique opportunities for non-invasive diagnostic of atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common cardiac arrhythmia in the United States which is associated with increased risk of stroke and heart failure. However, routine LGE-MRI measurement of intensity in arbitrary units (au) limits inter-patient and longitudinal intra-patient comparisons. We develop and validate a normalized measure, the image intensity ratio (IIR), for assessment of LA fibrosis on LGE-MRI. We demonstrate that the IIR obtained from LGE-MRI greatly improves comparability of LA fibrosis between and within patients.