Department of Radiology
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health

Pulmonary Embolism Detection: Comparison of Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Computed Tomography (CT)

The PI of this project was:

This project was funded by: Radiology RD

The term of this project was: July 2010 to May 2013

The number of subjects scanned during this project was: 50

This is a prospective study using the gold standard for pulmonary embolism diagnosis, computed tomography angiography (CTA), with comparison to a new test, magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). The MRA method will include a technique called parallel imaging to speed up image acquisition. Pulmonary perfusion images also will be acquired using a novel acquisition technique. We will be studying a total of 50 patients. There will be 40 patients with documented pulmonary embolism (PE) and 10 with no pulmonary embolism as determined from the CTA readings. Then these patients will get a research MRA-PE study. These research scans will be read blinded to the results of the CTA. Then sensitivity and specificity of the MRA-PE test will be calculated.