Microvasculature and intraplaque hemorrhage in atherosclerotic carotid lesions: a cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging study.

Background: The presence of intraplaque haemorrhage (IPH) has been related to plaque rupture, is associated with plaque progression, and predicts cerebrovascular events. However, the mechanisms leading to IPH are not fully understood. The dominant view is that IPH is caused by leakage of erythrocytes from immature microvessels.

Vessel wall and adventitial DCE-MRI parameters demonstrate similar correlations with carotid plaque microvasculature on histology.

Purpose: To assess parameter agreement of volume transfer coefficient (K ) between two vascular regions and to study the correlation with microvessel density on histology. The dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) parameter K is frequently used to study atherosclerotic plaque microvasculature. K has been reported using different descriptive statistics (mean, median, 75 percentile) either for the whole vessel wall or the adventitia in previous studies.