Arq Bras Cardiol: Imagem cardiovasc. 2024; 37(4): e20240114
Quantification of Myocardial Fibrosis by Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Advances, Impacts, and Perspectives
DOI: 10.36660/abcimg.20240114i
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) has been established as a fundamental tool for the diagnosis and management of cardiomyopathies, especially due to its accuracy in tissue characterization, identification, and quantification of myocardial fibrosis., Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) allows accurate assessment, identifying areas of myocardial fibrosis, and it serves to characterize, locate, and quantify them. In recent years, the role of LGE in the risk stratification of patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and other genetic cardiomyopathies has been the subject of several studies that aimed to correlate the presence and extent of myocardial fibrosis with the risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) and major cardiovascular events.–
Different techniques are currently used to acquire, analyze, and quantify LGE by CMR. The presence of LGE is based on the differential tissue retention of gadolinium, which is preferentially absorbed in areas of fibrosis, where scar tissue is altered due to the presence of collagen. LGE acquisition techniques nowadays are fast, safe, and can be performed without requiring long respiratory pauses, as was the case in the past, with progressively better resolution and image definition. To quantify areas of fibrosis, different software programs that allow adequate quantification in a semi-automated manner are currently available.
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