Gopal Varma1, Timothy Lockie2, Julien Senegas3, Stephen Keevil4, Sven Plein1,5, Tobias Schaeffter1
1Division of Imaging Sciences, King's College London, London, UK; 2Cardiovascular Division, King's College London, London, UK; 3Philips Research Europe, Hamburg, Germany; 4Medical Physics, Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK; 5Academic Unit of Cardiovascular Research, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
First pass myocardial perfusion MRI following the intravenous bolus injection of gadolinium-based contrast agents can be used for the non-invasive detection of coronary artery disease. However dark band or rim artefacts along parts of the subendocardial border are a common problem in first pass perfusion studies, which can be mistaken for perfusion defects, in particular by less experienced observers. The source of these artefacts has been attributed to magnetic susceptibility associated with the high concentration of the contrast agent during the first pass. In this work we show that the use of high-resolution susceptibility gradient mapping (SGM) helps to distinguish between perfusion defects and susceptibility induced artefacts. The high-resolution SGM technique uses the first pass perfusion data and thus requires no additional data acquisition.