Assessment of the Accuracy of Right Ventricle Volume and Function by Cmr

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has become the gold standard for functional and morphologic assessment of the right ventricle (RV). This study was designed to evaluate two right ventricular segmentation methods, in short axis and 4-chamber planes, in CMR studies, to determine its accuracy, and reproducibility by studying the interobserver variability, and to correlate it to the echocardiographic method TAPSE. Short axis and four chamber views of 50 right ventricles were acquired with steady-state free precession sequences at 1.5 T and were manually segmented. The two segmentations were compared and the end-diastolic volume, end-systolic volume and the ejection fraction were quantified. Feature tracking was feasible in all subjects. No statistically significant differences were found in the volumes and function of the right ventricle calculated by the two segmentation methods. Analysis did not reveal a statistically significant difference in interobserver reliability: trends favoring either the short axis orientation and a four chamber orientation in terms of reproducibility were not significant. Correlation between CMR measurements and TAPSE was poor.

keywords: Cardiac, Magnetic, Resonance, Segmentation, Function.