A Quicker, Breath-Easy Path to Detailed Heart Scans

Cardiac MRI scans, vital for assessing heart health, often require patients to hold their breath repeatedly, a challenge for many. Now, a new technique offers a promising alternative, enabling detailed heart imaging in under five minutes, all while the patient breathes freely.

Using a method called spin-echo echo planar imaging, researchers can simultaneously generate three different types of diagnostic maps—T1, T2, and ADC—across five slices of the heart. This integrated approach provides a rich characterisation of myocardial tissue, helping to spot abnormalities.

The method was evaluated in phantoms, healthy volunteers, and in clinical cases of myocardial infarction and cardiac amyloidosis. The results showed it could successfully identify tissue damage consistent with conventional scans. While its diffusion maps (ADC) were of comparable quality to reference techniques, the T1 and T2 relaxation maps received significantly lower quality scores from expert readers. Researchers conclude that this fast, free-breathing scan simplifies multi-contrast tissue analysis, with future work aimed at optimising image quality for broader clinical applications.