Andriy Shmatukha1, Xiuling Qi2, Sudip Ghate2, Jennifer Barry2, Graham Wright2, Eugene Crystal2
1Cardiac and Interventional Applied Science Laboratory, General Electric Healthcare, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 2Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Intra-operative MRI visualization of RF ablation lesions has the potential to make cardiac electrophysiology (EP) procedures more safe and efficient. Previous studies investigated MRI visualization aspects of quasi-simultaneous lesions created few minutes apart. However, in many clinical EP procedures lesions can be separated in time by dozens of minutes, which could potentially result in different lesion appearances on MR images acquired after multiple lesion applications. This works proves experimentally that RF ablation lesions separated by up to 45 minutes can be successfully visualized by the main MRI techniques and appear similar on the resulting images.
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