PLoS ONE (Jan 2012)

Clinical application of cine-MRI in the visual assessment of mitral regurgitation compared to echocardiography and cardiac catheterization.

  • John Heitner,
  • Geetha P Bhumireddy,
  • Anna Lisa Crowley,
  • Jonathan Weinsaft,
  • Salman A Haq,
  • Igor Klem,
  • Raymond J Kim,
  • James G Jollis

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040491
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 7
p. e40491

Abstract

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BackgroundDetecting and quantifying the severity of mitral regurgitation is essential for risk stratification and clinical decision-making regarding timing of surgery. Our objective was to assess specific visual parameters by cine-magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the determination of the severity of mitral regurgitation and to compare it to previously validated imaging modalities: echocardiography and cardiac ventriculography.MethodsThe study population consisted of 68 patients who underwent a cardiac MRI followed by an echocardiogram within a median time of 2.0 days and 49 of these patients who had a cardiac catheterization, median time of 2.0 days. The inter-rater agreement statistic (Kappa) was used to evaluate the agreement.ResultsThere was moderate agreement between cine MRI and Doppler echocardiography in assessing mitral regurgitation severity, with a kappa value of 0.47, confidence interval (CI) 0.29-0.65. There was also fair agreement between cine MRI and cardiac catheterization with a kappa value of 0.36, CI of 0.17-0.55.ConclusionCine MRI offers a reasonable alternative to both Doppler echocardiography and, to a lesser extent, cardiac catheterization for visually assessing the severity of mitral regurgitation with specific visual parameters during routine clinical cardiac MRI.