Sotirios A. Tsaftaris1,2, Xiangzhi Zhou2,
Debiao Li2,3, Rohan Dharmakumar2
1Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States; 2Radiology,
Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, United States; 3Biomedical
Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
Blood-oxygen-level
dependent (BOLD) MRI may be used for detecting myocardial oxygenation changes
secondary to coronary artery stenosis (CAS). Under pharmacological stress,
areas of the myocardium supplied by a stenotic coronary artery appear
hypointense relative to healthy regions in BOLD images. The purpose of this
work is to present a fundamentally new approach for visualizing and
quantifying regional myocardial BOLD signal changes. This approach, tested in
canines, relies on the statistical identification of myocardial pixels
affected by CAS, correlates strongly with true flow measurements, and most
importantly, leads to a significant increase in sensitivity to microvascular
flow changes compared to previous approaches.