Three-dimensional Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance for Children with Congenital Heart Disease

Severe congenital heart disease (CHD) affects approximately 1.2% of children and is the leading cause of birth defect-related deaths. Patients with severe CHD require multiple palliative surgeries during the first day of their lives to survive. Despite considerable improvement in the survival of these patients, there is increasing morbidity and mortality over time. It remains unclear why some of these patients fail their surgical repairs while others remain relatively well. Clinicians often rely on 2-dimensional (2D) images acquired from echocardiograms, catheterizations, or cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) exams to assess these patients and qualitatively choose the optimal surgical repair. The 2D images, however, lead to a suboptimal understanding of the complex 3D spatial relationships and hemodynamics, and limit efficient decision making.
To address this deficiency, we have developed a comprehensive 3D CMR sequence to acquire 3D block of images from patients with CHD. These 3D dataset is used for simultaneous assessment of cardiac function and hemodynamics. In this talk, we will introduce the conventional 2D CMR exam and discuss its limitations. The new 3D CMR exam will be then presented and compared with the 2D CMR exam in terms of cardiac function and hemodynamics.