Magnetic resonance imaging of blood flow in thoracic vessels of patients with impaired left ventricular function.

In order to test the ability of magnetic resonance (MR) in the detection of pathologic flow conditions in man, we imaged 10 normal volunteers and 10 patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) with ECG-gated MR. We used a single spin-echo sequence on a transverse plane through the main vessels of the upper chest. The analysis of the variation of the mean signal intensity vs time from the ascending aorta (AA), descending aorta (DA), and pulmonary artery (PA) of the ten normal volunteers on the TE = 30 ms images, showed a common pattern characterized by an end-diastolic intraluminal signal not present in other moments of the cardiac cycle. On the contrary, in patients with CHF, we did not observe the systolic disappearance of the intraluminal MR signal. The main difference between CHF patients and control subjects was found in the DA where an abnormally high signal intensity was present for the whole cardiac cycle. The MR imaging can offer blood flow information underlying the behavior of intraluminal signal intensity and could provide functional information in patients with heart failure.