Abstract #2167

Weiss D, Joseph G, Vega D, Oshinski J, Sun B, Giddens D, Long Jr. R, Taylor R

Purpose:To compare coronary atherosclerotic plaque characterization using multi-contrast MRI on 1) freshly-excised vessels under simulated in-vivo conditions, and 2) preserved vessels.Materials and Methods: T1, T2, proton density and diffusion-weighted MR images were acquired on thirteen freshly-excised human coronary arteries from explanted hearts. Vessels were imaged in an MR-compatible tissue culture chamber using a 4.7 Tesla small bore MR scanner. Eight vessels were then preserved in buffered formalin and rescanned following the same imaging protocol. A three-dimensional spatially penalized fuzzy c-means (3D-SPFCM) technique was applied to classify different plaque constituents. The classification results from vessels under fresh and preserved conditions were compared with corresponding histological sections.Results: For most plaque constituents, the plaque characterization results show no significant difference between fresh and preserved scans, and little difference between scans and the hi