Mohamed Kassem1,2, Ellen Boswijk2, Jochem Van der Pol2, Rik PM Moonen2, Jan Bucerius2, Zhaoyang Fan3, and M Eline Kooi1,2
1Radiology and Nuclear medicine, CARIM School for Cardiovascular Diseases, Maastricht, Netherlands, 2Radiology and Nuclear medicine, Maastricht university Medical Centre, Maastricht, Netherlands, 3Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Biomedical Imaging Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Multisequence carotid MRI is commonly used to
quantify plaque composition, but it has some disadvantages, i.e. long scan time
and image mis-registration errors. Multi-contrast Atherosclerosis
Characterization (MATCH) was developed to overcome these limitations. Eighteen
patients with ≥2 mm carotid plaques underwent carotid multisequence and MATCH MRI.
For the artery-based component detection, excellent agreement between MATCH and
multisequence MRI was obtained for identification of LRNC, substantial for IPH
and slight agreement for calcifications. No significant differences were shown
in measurements of volume of LRNC, IPH, calcifications, percentage wall volume
and normalized wall index.
