Comparison of canine ECV measurements derived from CMR: bolus injection vs. slow infusion of Gd-BOPTA
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Myocardial extracellular volume (ECV) fraction [ 1 ], derived from pre- and post-contrast cardiac T 1 measurements, is an emerging biomarker of diffuse cardiac fibrosis. The major benefits of ECV over post-contrast cardiac T 1 is that the former is less sensitive to confounders such as contrast agent type and dosage, specific delayed imaging time, renal function, and magnetic field strength. Recent studies using inversion-recovery (IR) based T 1 mapping in control human subjects[ 2 ] and patients[ 3 ] reported that ECV measured with a bolus injection of contrast agent agrees well with ECV measured with a slow infusion of contrast agent. It is unknown if this approximation holds in canines which are frequently used in preclinical research. We sought to compare canine ECV measurements derived from bolus and slow infusion protocols. Eighteen mongrel dogs with normal myocardium were imaged at 3T (Verio, Siemens). Cardiac T 1 maps were acquired in 3 short-axis planes (base, mid, and apex) using the arrhythmia-insensitive-rapid (AIR) cardiac T 1 mapping pulse sequence based on B 1 -insensitive saturation-recovery of magnetization preparation [ 4 ], with the following imaging parameters: spatial resolution = 1.4 × 1.4 × 7.0 mm, temporal resolution = 217 ms, saturation-recovery time = 600 ms. The AIR acquisition was performed with "paired" consecutive phase-encoding steps in centric k-space ordering to minimize image artifacts due to eddy currents. Cardiac T 1 maps were acquired pre-contrast, 15 min after a bolus injection of Gd-BOPTA (MultiHance; 0.15 mmol/kg), and 30 min after slow infusion of Gd-BOPTA (0.002 mmol/kg/min). Blood samples were drawn during MRI for hematocrit calculation. For image analysis, myocardium and blood pool were manually segmented, and myocardial and blood T 1 were calculated. Subsequently, ECV was calculated as ECV=(1-hematocrit)x(ΔR 1, myocardium /ΔR 1, blood ), where R 1 is T 1 , and Δ is the difference between post- and pre-contrast. Linear regression and Bland-Altman analyses were performed to compare the results, and magnitude of effect size of the observed difference was calculated using Cohen's d from t-tests. As shown in Figure 1 , ECV measurements derived from the two different injection protocols were strongly correlated (Pearson's R = 0.93, p < 0.001) and in fair agreement (mean difference = 0.011, upper and lower 95% limits = 0.027 and -0.0045), which corresponds to a medium effect size in difference (d = 0.55). (left) Linear regression and (right) Bland-Altman analyses comparing ECV measurements between bolus and slow infusion protocols . This study suggests that the contrast agent kinetics between canines and humans are slightly different and that in canines 15 min after a bolus injection may not be dynamic equilibrium.
Institution: University of Utah
Language: English
Subfield: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,000
OpenAlex ID: W2077269059