Sathya Vijayakumar1,2, Eugene G. Kholmovski1,2,
Ravi Ranjan2,3, Gene Payne1,2, Joshua Blauer2,4,
Kamal Vij5, Nelly A. Volland1,2, Gaston Vergara2,3,
Kimberly Johnson2,3, Gregory Gardner4,6, Steven Shea7,
Sunil Patil7, Julien Barbot7, Christopher J. McGann2,3,
Peter Piferi5, Christine Lorenz7, Rob MacLeod2,4,
Nassir F. Marrouche2,3
1UCAIR, Department of
Radiology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States; 2CARMA
Center, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States; 3Department
of Cardiology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States; 4SCI
Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States; 5SurgiVision
Inc., Irvine, CA, United States; 6Dept. of BioEngineering,
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; 7Center for Applied
Medical Imaging, Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ, United States
In this work we have shown that under identical conditions of RF ablation of atrial wall, two types of injuries could be created. The first type was a very prominent transmural lesion, while the second type was superficial injury to the endocardial surface of the atrium. Although similar reduction in electrogram amplitude was observed for both types of lesions, the LGE-MR images were very different. LGE-MRI has the potential to accurately assess acute atrial lesions.