New "gold standard" for assessing myocardial oedema in STEMI?

Background The current “gold standard” CMR sequence for assessing myocardial oedema following STEMI is controversial. T2 Short-Tau Inversion Recovery (T2-STIR) is in widespread clinical use but can lack robustness. Steady state free precession oedema imaging (SSFP/ACUT2E) has emerging data to support it as a more reproducible method for oedema assessment. A novel T2 mapping method is also available to determine myocardial oedema. The potential benefit of this method is that the numerical output of the method is largely independent of myocardial motion, instrumental errors (e.g., surface coil normalisation methods). More recently, imaging early after gadolinium contrast administration (EGE) has been suggested as an alternative to detect myocardial oedema following STEMI. The aim of this study was to assess which of the CMR sequences for detecting myocardial oedema following STEMI is most robust.