Myocardial Iron Assessment by T1 Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance at 1.5 Tesla

Background Heart failure secondary to cardiac siderosis is the prevalent cause of mortality in patients with primary or secondary iron overload. Myocardial iron assessment using T2* has been successfully calibrated against myocardial iron at 1.5T and the black blood (BB) technique has demonstrated high reproducibility such that it has become the clinical gold standard. T1 appears to correlate with T2* in cases of significant iron loading (T2* < 20 ms) but this relationship weakens when T2* is in the normal range. We evaluated this further. Methods