Black-blood Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Automated AI-based Segmentation for Highly Detailed Characterization of Myocardial Scar – HEARTFACT

Cardiovascular diseases cause more than a third of all deaths in Europe. Late gadolinium enhancement cardiac magnetic resonance (LGE-CMR) plays a central role in the management of patients with structural heart diseases by providing high contrast between the injured and healthy myocardium. Unfortunately, using the current bright-blood state-of-the-art approach, scar tissue adjacent to the blood pool often remains concealed due to low 2D spatial resolution and poor contrast between blood and scar. Building on strong preliminary data, combined expertise, and using a translational approach, the team led by Aurélien Bustin will address this major issue by developing novel 2D & 3D free-breathing joint bright- and black-blood LGE-CMR approaches, coupled with artificial-intelligence-based automated segmentation, to characterize myocardial scar at unprecedented contrast and spatial resolution. This approach has the potential to change the way cardiovascular diseases are managed in clinical practice.