An Area-Based Imaging Biomarker for the Characterization of Coronary Artery Stenosis with Blood Oxygen-Sensitive MRI

Sotirios Athanasios Tsaftaris^1,2, Richard Tang², Xiangzhi Zhou², Debiao Li², Rohan Dharmakumar²

Current approaches for analyzing myocardial BOLD changes are suboptimal for detecting critical stenosis. This study proposes, ARREAS (Area-based biomaRker for chaRactErizing coronAry Stenosis), a statistical approach relying on the differences between rest and stress images, to characterize BOLD changes with exquisite sensitivity and specificity. Findings are validated with microsphere perfusion measurements. The method has the potential to rapidly determine the presence of oxygenation anomalies in the myocardium due to coronary artery disease, and provide an unbiased and quantitative imaging biomarker that can enable the assessment of the critical states of stenosis on the basis of BOLD MRI.