Use of HASTE MRI in the evaluation of acute injury to left atrial wall caused by RF ablation

Abstract

Introduction Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac rhythm disturbance affecting more than 2 million people in the United States. Pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) procedure using RF ablation has emerged as a new promising treatment of AF. Reported procedure success rates vary significantly with recurrences ranging from 40-86%. With introduction of EP-MRI suites, patients may be re-ablated immediately after assessment of the extent of LA wall injury, if necessary. Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) [1,2] and double inversion recovery (DIR) prepared T2weighted (T2w) fast/turbo spin echo (FSE/TSE) [3-5] were proposed to evaluate acute LA wall injury. The main disadvantages of these sequences are a long scan time and a strong dependence of image quality on heart rate regularity.