Authors:
A. Esposito, F. De Cobelli, C. Sallemi, S. Ravelli, A. Del Maschio; Milan/IT
DOI:
10.1594/ecr2010/C-0736
Purpose
Background
Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) has an established role in the diagnosis and the follow-up of acute myocarditis (AM) and its subsequent stages, with late enhancement technique as effective tool to assess the myocardial damage typical of AM1-2.
Some studies compared different contrast media in late gadolinium enhancement (LE) imaging for the assessment of acute or chronic myocardial injury3-4-5-6-7 but no data are available about the comparison between conventional 0.5M gadolinium-based contrast agent (Gd-CA) and new 1M Gd-CA in this technique.
Conventional 0.5M gadolinium-based contrast-agents are commonly used at double-dose (0.2mmol/kg) to obtain LE images with good signal-to-noise (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR).
1M Gadobutrol (Gadovist®) Gd-CA has potential advantage for cardiac MR imaging over conventional 0.5M Gd-CA, specially in challenging task as the non-invasive detection of small areas of myocardial damage typical of myocarditis with LE techniques.
Purpose
We sought to test the hypothesis that Gadovist®, due to its stronger T1 effect, may allow optimal LE images using single-dose (0.1mmol/kg) comparable to double-dose (0.2mmol/Kg) 0.5M Gd-CA.