The image quality and diagnostic accuracy of T1-mapping-based synthetic late gadolinium enhancement imaging: comparison with conventional late gadolinium enhancement imaging in real-life clinical situation

BACKGROUNDS: Synthetic late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) images are less sensitive to inversion time (TI) and robust to motion artifact, because it is generated retrospectively by post-contrast T1-mapping images. To explore the clinical applicability of synthetic LGE, we investigated the image quality and diagnostic accuracy of synthetic LGE images, in comparison to that of conventional LGE for various disease groups. METHOD AND MATERIALS: From July to November 2019, a total of 98 patients who underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR), including LGE and T1-mapping sequences, with suspicion of myocardial abnormality were retrospectively included. Synthetic magnitude inversion-recovery (IR) and phase-sensitive IR (PSIR) images were generated through calculations based on the post-contrast T1-mapping sequence. Three cardiothoracic radiologists independently analyzed the image quality of conventional and synthetic LGE images on an ordinal scale with per-segment basis and the image qualities were compared with chi-square test. The agreement of LGE detection was analyzed on per-patient and per-segment basis with Cohen’s kappa test. In addition, the LGE area and percentage were semi-quantitatively analyzed for LGE positive ischemic (n = 14) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (n = 13) subgroups by two cardiothoracic radiologists. The difference of quantified LGE area and percentage between conventional and synthetic LGE images were assessed with Mann–Whitney U-test and the inter-reader agreement was assessed with Bland–Altman analysis. RESULTS: The image quality of synthetic images was significantly better than conventional images in both magnitude IR and PSIR through all three observers (P < 0.001, all). The agreements of per-patient and per-segment LGE detection rates were excellent (kappa = 0.815–0.864). The semi-quantitative analysis showed no significant difference in the LGE area and percentage between conventional and synthetic LGE images. In the inter-reader agreement showed only small systematic differences in both magnitude IR and PSIR and synthetic LGE images showed smaller systematic biases compared to conventional LGE images. CONCLUSION: Compared to conventional LGE images, synthetic LGE images have better image quality in real-life clinical situation. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12968-022-00857-1.