%0 Conference Paper
%A Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
%A Tang, Richard
%A Zhou, Xiangzhi 
%A Li, Debiao
%A Dharmakumar, Rohan
%B 19th meeting of the international society for magnetic resonance in medicine
%C Montreal, Quebec, Canada
%D 2011
%F eprints:852
%T An area-based imaging biomarker for the characterization of coronary artery stenosis with blood oxygen-sensitive MRI
%U http://eprints.imtlucca.it/852/
%X BOLD MRI may be used for detecting myocardial oxygenation changes secondary to coronary artery stenosis (1-3). Under  pharmacological stress, the myocardial bed supplied by the stenotic coronary artery appears hypointense relative to healthy regions in BOLD images. Manual windowing (to visualize signal changes) and segmentation according to the American Heart Association’s (AHA) recommendation are often used to characterize the BOLD effect. However, current approaches for analyzing BOLD changes are suboptimal for detecting critical stenosis (reduction in perfusion reserve below 2:1). The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that, ARREAS (Area-based biomaRker for chaRactErizing coronAry Stenosis), an area-based statistical approach relying on the differences between rest and stress images, can characterize BOLD changes in end-systole and end-diastole with exquisite sensitivity and specificity. This hypothesis was tested in a canine model.