Cardiac MR salvage imagingshows therapy benefits

Cardiac researchers assessing the benefits of revascularization therapies will operate a little less in the dark thanks to salvage imaging, a new cardiac MR technique that relies on T2-weighted pulse sequences to identify heart muscle tissue that would have been permanently damaged after an ischemic event if revascularization therapy had not been applied.

Dr. Holger Thiele, a cardiac MRI researcher at the University of Leipzig in Germany, demonstrated at the 2009 Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance meeting how salvage imaging can simplify clinical trials. According to Dr. Eike Nagel, director of cardiovascular MRI at the German Heart Institute in Berlin, salvage imaging will help evaluate the clinical efficacy of hundreds of techniques designed to improve revascularization therapy.