MR-compatible Devices for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Cardiomyopathies

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is a non-invasive imaging technique with exquisite soft-tissue detail for the assessment of heart structure and function and provides an excellent screening tool but cannot always obviate more invasive procedures, such as endomyocardial biopsy (EMB).

Interventional CMR (iCMR) is a minimally invasive technique without radiation, which has been hampered by the lack of non-ferrous devices that can be easily visualized, enabling the navigation of tasks, such as EMB, safely.

Currently, one in nine deaths in the US is attributed to heart failure (HF), with health care costs exceeding $30 billion in 2013.

Of the ~5.1 million Americans with HF, the definitive treatment is heart transplantation (HTx), where rejection is assessed with endomyocardial biopsy (EMB) ? a procedure performed under X-ray guidance to obtain random samples of the right ventricular septum.

However, many patients, especially children with cardiomyopathy and after HTx and HF caused by non-ischemic cardiomyopathies (NICM), do not have global changes to the myocardium, but rather, patchy disease, which is often restricted to limited portions of the left ventricle. Thus, EMB may yield a definitive diagnosis in