Dana C. Peters1,
Jaime L. Shaw2, James William Goldfarb3, Warren J.
Manning4, 5
1Diagnostic
Radiology, Yale Medical School, New Haven, CT, United States; 2Biomedical
Engineering, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 3,Department of
Research and Education,, St. Francis Hospital, Roslyn, NY, United States; 4Medicine,
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, United States; 5Radiology,
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
High spatial resolution LGE is currently used to evaluate left atrial (LA) remodeling and scar. LGE uses fat-suppression, which is considered necessary for visualizing enhancement due to scar/remodeling, since the thin LA wall is covered in fat. To understand the impact of fat-suppression on image quality and identification of LGE, we compared water-only and water-fat opposed-phased LGE images, obtained from dual-echo Dixon LGE scans of 12 patients prior to a 1st PVI. Agreement was found in 87% of regions, using an 18 region model of the LA. We conclude that fat-suppression may not be an absolute requirement.