Characterizing Global and Regional Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging Metrics in Healthy Subjects
摘要
Cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (cDTI) is an MRI technique used to characterize myocardial microstructure. Key metrics including mean diffusivity (MD), fractional anisotropy (FA), and helix angle pitch (HAP) have shown relevance in detecting microstructural remodeling. Herein, we aim to establish healthy baseline metrics for this emerging technique. To do so we assess average global cDTI metrics in the left ventricle for a cohort of healthy subjects (N = 46) at 3 T with a single- shot echo-planar imaging (EPI) sequence. We hypothesize: (1) that there are no significant differences in cDTI metrics for groups within this population; and (2) that there are no significant differences between global, regional, and group-wide median values. To assess differences in global and regional cDTI metrics between groups, a one-way ANOVA test (for normal distributions) or Kruskal-Wallis test (for non-normal distributions) was performed to detect significance in cDTI metrics between four population groups: (1) Male < 40 years old (yo), Female < 40yo, Male \(\ge \) 40yo, and Female \(\ge \) 40yo. To evaluate differences in regional group-wide cDTI metrics compared to the global group-wide median, American Heart Association (AHA) segments were identified and unpaired t-tests with Bonferroni correction were used to detect significance between individual regions and the global group-wide median. We found no significant differences in global MD, FA, and HAP between age- and sex-based groups. Regional analysis revealed some significant differences compared to global group-wide cDTI metrics as well as in a few regions in group-specific comparisons. Overall, this study establishes baseline cDTI metrics in healthy subjects, providing a normative reference for assessing changes in cDTI metrics.