Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate the correlation between local myocardial function estimates from CT and myocardial strain from tagged MRI in the same heart. Accurate detection of regional myocardial dysfunction can be an important finding in the diagnosis of functionally significant coronary artery disease. Tagged MRI is currently a reference standard for noninvasive regional myocardial function analysis; however, it has practical drawbacks. We have developed a CT imaging protocol and automated image analysis algorithm for estimating regional cardiac function from a few heartbeats. This method tracks the motion of the left ventricular (LV) endocardial surface to produce local function maps: we call the method Stretch Quantification of Endocardial Engraved Zones (SQUEEZ). Myocardial infarction was created by ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery for 2 h followed by reperfusion in canine models. Tagged and cine MRI scans were performed during the reperfusion phase and first-pass contrast enhanced CT scans were acquired. The average delay between the CT and MRI scans was <1 h. Circumferential myocardial strain (Ecc) was calculated from the tagged MRI data. The agreement between peak systolic Ecc and SQUEEZ was investigated in 162 segments in the 9 hearts. Linear regression and Bland–Altman analysis was used to assess the correlation between the two metrics of local LV function. The results show good agreement between SQUEEZ and Ecc: (r = 0.71, slope = 0.78, p < 0.001). Furthermore, Bland–Altman showed a small bias of −0.02 with 95 % confidence interval of 0.1, and standard deviation of 0.05 representing ~6.5 % of the dynamic range of LV function. The good agreement between the estimates of local myocardial function obtained from CT SQUEEZ and tagged MRI provides encouragement to investigate the use of SQUEEZ for measuring regional cardiac function at a low clinical dose in humans.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Seneviratne SK, Truong QA, Bamberg F, Rogers IS, Shapiro MD, Schlett CL, Chae CU, Cury R, Abbara S, Brady TJ, Nagurney JT, Hoffmann U (2010) Incremental diagnostic value of regional left ventricular function over coronary assessment by cardiac computed tomography for the detection of acute coronary syndrome in patients with acute chest pain: from the ROMICAT trial. Circ Cardiovasc Imaging 3:375–383
Cury RC, Feuchtner GM, Batlle JC, Peña CS, Janowitz W, Katzen BT, Ziffer JA (2013) Triage of patients presenting with chest pain to the emergency department: implementation of coronary CT angiography in a large urban health care system. Am J Roentgenol 200:57–65
Budoff MJ, Dowe D, Jollis JG, Gitter M, Sutherland J, Halamert E, Scherer M, Bellinger R, Martin A, Benton R, Delago A, Min JK (2008) Diagnostic performance of 64-multidetector row coronary computed tomographic angiography for evaluation of coronary artery stenosis in individuals without known coronary artery disease: results from the prospective multicenter ACCURACY (Assessment by Coro. J Am Coll Cardiol 52:1724–1732
Min JK, Leipsic J, Pencina MJ, Berman DS, Koo BK, van Mieghem C, Erglis A, Lin FY, Dunning AM, Apruzzese P, Budoff MJ, Cole JH, Jaffer FA, Leon MB, Malpeso J, Mancini GB, Park SJ, Schwartz RS, Shaw LJ, Mauri L (2012) Diagnostic accuracy of fractional flow reserve from anatomic CT angiography. JAMA 308:1237–1245
Al-Mallah MH, Qureshi W, Lin FY, Achenbach S, Berman DS, Budoff MJ, Callister TQ, Chang HJ, Cademartiri F, Chinnaiyan K, Chow BJ, Cheng VY, Delago A, Gomez M, Hadamitzky M, Hausleiter J, Kaufmann PA, Leipsic J, Maffei E, Raff G, Shaw LJ, Villines TC, Cury RC, Feuchtner G, Plank F, Kim YJ, Dunning AM, Min JK (2014) Does coronary CT angiography improve risk stratification over coronary calcium scoring in symptomatic patients with suspected coronary artery disease? Results from the prospective multicenter international CONFIRM registry. Eur Heart J Cardiovasc Imaging 15(3):267–274
Douglas PS, Hoffmann U, Patel MR, Mark DB, Al-Khalidi HR, Cavanaugh B, Cole J, Dolor RJ, Fordyce CB, Huang M, Khan MA, Kosinski AS, Krucoff MW, Malhotra V, Picard MH, Udelson JE, Velazquez EJ, Yow E, Cooper LS, Lee KL (2015) Outcomes of anatomical versus functional testing for coronary artery disease. N Engl J Med 372(14):1291–1300
Pourmorteza A, Schuleri KH, Herzka DA, Lardo AC, McVeigh ER (2012) A new method for cardiac computed tomography regional function assessment: stretch quantifier for endocardial engraved zones (SQUEEZ). Circ Cardiovasc Imaging 5:243–250
Pourmorteza A, Schuleri KH, Herzka DA, Lardo AC, McVeigh ER (2012) Regional cardiac function assessment in 4D CT: comparison between SQUEEZ and ejection fraction, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC). In: Annual international conference of the IEEE, 2012
Guttman MA, Zerhouni EA, McVeigh ER (1997) Analysis of cardiac function from MR Images. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 17:30–38
Ozturk C, McVeigh ER (2000) Four-dimensional B-spline based motion analysis of tagged MR images: introduction and in vivo validation. Phys Med Biol 45:1683–1702
Symons R, Masci PG, Goetschalckx K, Doulaptsis K, Janssens S, Bogaert J (2014) Effect of infarct severity on regional and global left ventricular remodeling in patients with successfully reperfused ST segment elevation myocardial infarction. Radiology 274:93–102
Inoue Y, Yang X, Nagao M, Higashino H, Hosokawa K, Kido T, Kurata A, Okayama H, Higaki J, Mochizuki T (2010) Peri-infarct dysfunction in post-myocardial infarction: assessment of 3-T tagged and late enhancement MRI. Eur Radiol 20:1139–1148
Bland JM, Altman DG (1999) Measuring agreement in method comparison studies. Stat Methods Med Res 8:135–160
Mahnken AH, Bruners P, Schmidt B, Bornikoel C, Flohr T, Günther RW (2009) Left ventricular function can reliably be assessed from dual-source CT using ECG-gated tube current modulation. Invest Radiol 44:384–389
Nakazato R, Tamarappoo BK, Smith TW, Cheng VY, Dey D, Shmilovich H, Gutstein A, Gurudevan S, Hayes SW, Thomson LEJ, Friedman JD, Berman DS (2011) Assessment of left ventricular regional wall motion and ejection fraction with low-radiation dose helical dual-source CT: comparison to two-dimensional echocardiography. J Cardiovasc Comput Tomogr 5:149–157
Tee MW, Won S, Raman FS, Yi C, Vigneault DM, Davies-Venn C, Liu S, Lardo AC, Lima JAC, Noble JA (2015) Regional strain analysis with multidetector CT in a swine cardiomyopathy model: relationship to cardiac MR tagging and myocardial fibrosis. Radiology 142339
Moore CC, Lugo-Olivieri CH, McVeigh ER, Zerhouni EA (2000) Three-dimensional systolic strain patterns in the normal human left ventricle: characterization with tagged MR imaging. Radiology 214:453–466
Cademartiri F, Maffei E, Arcadi T, Catalano O, Midiri M (2013) CT coronary angiography at an ultra-low radiation dose (<0.1 mSv): feasible and viable in times of constraint on healthcare costs. Eur Radiol 23:607–613
Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by the Maryland Innovation Initiative grant (115127) titled “Diagnostic Method for Rapid Detection of Significant Coronary Heart Disease”.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
Drs. Pourmorteza and McVeigh are inventors on a pending patent for SQUEEZ (WO Patent 2013056082).
Ethical approval
All applicable international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pourmorteza, A., Chen, M.Y., van der Pals, J. et al. Correlation of CT-based regional cardiac function (SQUEEZ) with myocardial strain calculated from tagged MRI: an experimental study. Int J Cardiovasc Imaging 32, 817–823 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10554-015-0831-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10554-015-0831-7