Comparison Study on Different Quantification Methods of Diffuse Myocardial Fibrosis of Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Copyright © 2013 Takeshi Hayashida et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Li-cense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Purpose: The purpose is to compare several quantification methods and clarify which quantification method is reliable to estimate diffuse myocardial fibrosis with cardiac MRI in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) using myo-cardial T1 value. Methods and Results: Delayed enhancement imaging was performed in 52 patients with DCM and 10 control subjects to identify fibrosis using an inversion time scout sequence. The mean contrast-enhanced myocardial (M) T1 values of the pre and post contrast-enhanced myocardial and left ventricular lumen (L) of control and dilated cardiomyopathy cases were compared. The calculated post M T1 value, pre M T1 value-post M T1 value, and (pre M TI value-post M T1 value)/(pre L T1 value-post L T1 value) were significantly different between the patient group and the control group (344.5 ± 31.6 vs. 390.4 ± 19.3 msec, 239.9 ± 64.2 msec vs. 134.0 ± 28.9 msec, and 0.50 ± 0.11 vs. 0.30 ± 0.60, respectively). (Pre M T1 value-post M T1 value)/(pre L T1 value-post L T1 value) was significantly the most re-lated to the left ventricular ejection fraction (r = 0.66, p < 0.0001). Conclusion: (Pre M T1 value-post M T1 value)/(pre L T1 value-post L T1 value) was the most reliable quantification method to estimate the severity of DCM