Surveillance of abdominal aortic aneurysm using accelerated 3D non-contrast blackblood cardiovascular magnetic resonance with compressed sensing (CS-DANTE-SPACE)

Background: 3D non-contrast high-resolution black-blood cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) (DANTESPACE) has been used for surveillance of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) and validated against computed tomography (CT) angiography. However, it requires a long scan time of more than 7 min. We sought to develop an accelerated sequence applying compressed sensing (CS-DANTE-SPACE) and validate it in AAA patients undergoing surveillance. Methods: Thirty-eight AAA patients (all males, 73 +/- 6 years) under clinical surveillance were recruited for this study. All patients were scanned with DANTE-SPACE (scan time 7:10 min) and CS-DANTE-SPACE (scan time 4:12 min, a reduction of 41.4%). Nine 9 patients were scanned more than 2 times. In total, 50 pairs of images were available for comparison. Two radiologists independently evaluated the image quality on a 1-4 scale, and measured the maximal diameter of AAA, the intra-luminal thrombus (ILT) and lumen area, ILT-to-muscle signal intensity ratio, and the ILT-tolumen contrast ratio. The sharpness of the aneurysm inner/outer boundaries was quantified. Results: CS-DANTE-SPACE achieved comparable image quality compared with DANTE-SPACE (3.15 +/- 0.67 vs. 3.03 +/- 0.64, p = 0.06). There was excellent agreement between results from the two sequences for diameter/area and ILT ratio measurements (ICCs> 0.85), and for quantifying growth rate (3.3 +/- 3.1 vs. 3.3 +/- 3.4mm/year, ICC = 0.95.) CS-DANTESPACE showed a higher ILT-to-lumen contrast ratio (p = 0.01) and higher sharpness than DANTE-SPACE (p = 0.002). Both sequences had excellent inter-reader reproducibility for quantitative measurements (ICC > 0.88). Conclusion: CS-DANTE-SPACE can reduce scan time while maintaining image quality for AAA imaging. It is a promising tool for the surveillance of patients with AAA disease in the clinical setting.