Free-breathing, motion-corrected late gadolinium enhancement is robust and extends risk stratification to vulnerable patients.

BACKGROUND: Routine clinical use of novel free-breathing, motion-corrected, averaged late-gadolinium-enhancement (moco-LGE) cardiovascular MR may have advantages over conventional breath-held LGE (bh-LGE), especially in vulnerable patients. METHODS AND
RESULTS: In 390 consecutive patients, we collected bh-LGE and moco-LGE with identical image matrix parameters. In 41 patients, bh-LGE was abandoned because of image quality issues, including 10 with myocardial infarction. When both were acquired, myocardial infarction detection was similar (McNemar test, P=0.4) with high agreement (κ=0.95). With artifact-free bh-LGE images, pixelwise myocardial infarction measures correlated highly (R(2)=0.96) without bias. Moco-LGE was faster, and image quality and diagnostic confidence were higher on blinded review (P<0.001 for all). During a median of 1.2 years, 20 heart failure hospitalizations and 18 deaths occurred. For bh-LGE, but not moco-LGE, inferior image quality and bh-LGE nonacquisition were linked to patient vulnerability confirmed by adverse outcomes (log-rank P<0.001). Moco-LGE significantly stratified risk in the full cohort (log-rank P<0.001), but bh-LGE did not (log-rank P=0.056) because a significant number of vulnerable patients did not receive bh-LGE (because of arrhythmia or inability to hold breath).
CONCLUSIONS: Myocardial infarction detection and quantification are similar between moco-LGE and bh-LGE when bh-LGE can be acquired well, but bh-LGE quality deteriorates with patient vulnerability. Acquisition time, image quality, diagnostic confidence, and the number of successfully scanned patients are superior with moco-LGE, which extends LGE-based risk stratification to include patients with vulnerability confirmed by outcomes. Moco-LGE may be suitable for routine clinical use.