Automated regional wall motion abnormality detection by combining rest and stress cardiac MRI: Correlation with contrast‐enhanced MRI

Purpose: To correlate an automated regional wall motion abnormality (RWMA) detection method based on combined rest and dobutamine-stress cardiac MRI with the assessment of myocardial infarction from contrast-enhanced MRI (CE-MRI), and to demonstrate that adding stress data improves the detection of scar segments compared with rest data alone. Materials and Methods: An automated RWMA detection method was built based on a statistical model of normokinetic myocardium from 41 healthy volunteers. The method was adapted to detect changes in RWMA from rest to stress. Twelve patients with myocardial infarction were included in the experiment. The correlation with CE-MRI was performed on two measurements: infarct transmurality and scar detection. Results: Compared with infarct transmurality, the probability of normokinetic motion decreased progressively as infarct transmurality increased. These probability values were 0.59 for non-scar segments, for <25% transmurality was 0.4 (SE = 0.04), for 25–50% was 0.33 (SE = 0.03), for 50–75% was 0.21 (SE = 0.03) and for ≥75% was 0.10 (SE = 0.03). For scar tissue detection, adding stress data significantly improved the performance (P < 0.001, confidence interval = 99.9%). The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy increased by 34%, 30%, and 32%, respectively. The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve was 0.63 when rest-only data was used, but it was improved to 0.87 when stress data was added. Conclusion: The presented automated RWMA assessment was capable of detecting wall motion improvements from rest to stress. The method correlated well with infarct transmurality from CE-MRI. Detection of scar regions was more accurate when rest and stress data were combined compared with rest data alone. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2011;. © 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc.