Visualising inflammation after myocardial infarction with the use of iron oxide nanoparticles

Today, cardiovascular MRI (CMR) is widely used for diagnosis and therapeutic decision making in the setting of different cardiac diseases. CMR allows to analyse anatomical and functional parameters, and enables a non-invasive, accurate and repeatable assessment of changes in myocardial tissue. For example, contrast-enhanced CMR techniques such as late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) imaging enable an accurate, however, unspecific detection of myocardial damage, caused by myocardial infarction (MI). In addition, T2 and T2*-weighted CMR techniques allow to detect myocardial oedema as well as myocardial haemorrhage (in case of acute MI) and thereby provide additional information on infarct pathology and prediction of adverse outcome—at least in some cases.

Regarding the initiation of timely and adequate therapy, diagnosis of myocardial inflammation in the early phase of heart disease—before the occurrence of structural changes in the myocardium—is crucial. Unfortunately, T2-weighted CMR techniques that promise to depict myocardial oedema as the first morphological change in the...