Fat saturation magnetic resonance imaging of acute myocardial infarction

In this paper, we report a potential usefulness of the fat saturation technique for cardiac MR imaging to improve image quality. Twenty-seven patients with acute myocardial infarction underwent both conventional and fat-saturated T1-weighted MR imaging. In each patient, contrast-to-noise (C/N) ratio of fat-saturated MR images to plain T1-weighted images was calculated for quantitative assessment. Detectability of an infarcted lesion was assessed, which was depicted as an area of high signal intensity. The overall mean ratio of C/N of fat saturation MR images to that of conventional T1-weighted images was 1.86±1.52 (p=0.007). In visual assessment, fat saturation imaging was superior to T1-weighted imaging in 17 cases (63%), and the fat saturation method enabled us to differentiate between the infarcted lesions and the pericardial fat tissues in 3 of the 17 cases. In 9 cases (33%), no apparent distinction in the infarcted area detectability was seen between these two methods. There was one case that fat saturation images was inferior to conventional T1-weighted images. These results suggest that fat saturation MR imaging will be a potentially useful method to diagnose acute myocardial infarction.