Arrhythmogenic right ventricular disease: MR imaging vs angiography.

Arrhythmogenic right ventricular disease (ARVD) is increasingly found in young adults with ventricular arrhythmias and is characterized by ventricular tachycardia originating within the right ventricle and regional or diffuse abnormalities in the contraction of the right ventricle. Until now, the gold standard for the detection of global and regional abnormalities of the right ventricular wall has been angiography combined with biopsy. The purpose of the current study was to compare MR imaging with angiography for assessing the location and extent of morphologic and functional abnormalities in patients with ARVD.Electrocardiographically gated spin-echo and cine gradient-echo MR imaging of the heart was performed in 36 consecutive patients with biopsy-proved ARVD. Patients were prospectively separated into two groups according to the results of invasive electrophysiologic tests (18 with inducible ventricular tachycardia during invasive electrophysiologic studies [ARVD 1] and 18 without inducible ventricula...