Monday, November 23, 2009

Strain-Encoding MRI Quantifies Muscle Contractions of The Heart

Filed under: Cardiology , Radiology

At next week's annual RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) meeting, Diagnosoft out of Morrisville, NC and Palo Alto, CA will be showing off its new MRI technique for measuring the myocardial dynamics. The SENC method is currently available on certain Philips MRI scanners, but can be adopted to machines made by other firms.

Strain-encoding, or SENC, is a new MRI technique that will help physicians measure regional contraction, or relaxation, of the heart’s myocardium. Deformations within regions of the myocardium are measured by the mechanical quantity, strain, and correlate with the contractility of the muscle. Normal myocardium is expected to contract to reduce the size of the cavity and eject the blood out of the chambers; therefore, strain values will be in negative numbers, indicating such contraction. Abnormal contraction (or no contraction) of the myocardium results in less degree of strain (even zero or positive values). The strain measured by SENC provides a quantitative assessment of the myocardium as kinetic, hypkinetic, akinetic, or dyskenitic, rather than the subjective methods currently used.

Technically, SENC is a special pulse sequence that currently runs on the Philips MRI scanners, but it can be adopted to run on other MRI systems produced by other manufacturers. SENC is a great addition to the Diagnosoft solution set because it does not require a second step of image processing as with analyzing tagged MR images.

Product page: Diagnosoft SENC...

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