Feasibility of quantitative susceptibility mapping in post-mortem myocardium

Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) is a novel contrast technique enabled by post-processing MRI magnitude and phase images, which reveals the tissues underlying magnetic susceptibility property. In the presented work recently developed QSM algorithms were evaluated based on phantom MRI acquisitions with different sequences to provide information in terms of accuracy, precision, and stability depending on the input sequence. The whole QSM workflow included MRI acquisitions with three different sequences, masking, executing the algorithm and image registration. Further, ex situ porcine hearts acquisitions serve for a better sequence evaluation with hearts embedded in air and water. The last ex situ porcine hearts experiments with hearts embedded in air, water, galden and agarose are dedicated to gain information about the influence of the embedding media on the calculated tissue’s magnetic susceptibility in the myocardium. Overall, the work should give an overview of latest open-access QSM algorithms applied to myocardium acquisitions, trying to answer the question whether QSM is ready for a post-mortem application to serve as a tissue specific investigation method for myocardium alterations, for example the detection of myocardial infarctions.