Aortic regurgitation: multimodal assessment of quantification and impact.

Background: The assessment of severity of aortic regurgitation (AR) by transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) remains challenging in routine practice. Contemporary guidelines recommend cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) in patients with significant disease and suboptimal TTE images. The objective of this study was to assess the role of CMR in the evaluation of severity of AR and to compare both modalities in the quantification of regurgitation and left ventricular volumes.

Methods: Fifty consecutive patients who had isolated chronic AR and who underwent TTE and CMR within an interval of less than three months between May 2009 and June 2020 were included. The main indication for CMR was difficulties in quantifying AR, either because of lack of multiparametric analysis (only one method possible) or because of discrepancies in the different methods by TTE.

Results: In 25 patients, precise grading of AR was not possible by echocardiography. Among them, CMR finally detected seven patients with mild AR, 11 with moderate AR and seven with severe AR. For the 25 patients who had AR quantification by TTE, there was concordance between TTE and CMR in only seven patients (28%), and the AR was re-graded by CMR in 18 patients, including eight patients with severe AR by TTE and moderate AR by CMR. The concordance between TTE and CMR was weakly significant (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.39, 95% confidence interval: 0.003-0.67, = 0.02). There was a moderate correlation between left ventricular volumes measured by TTE and by CMR (left ventricular end-diastolic volume: = 0.57; = 0.01; left ventricular end-systolic volume: = 0.47, = 0.01) but regurgitant volumes were not correlated ( = 0.04; = 0.8). No TTE parameter of quantification was correlated with regurgitant volume measured by CMR.

Conclusions: The concordance of AR quantification by CMR and TTE was weak. CMR re-graded some patients with severe AR by TTE into moderate AR. This should motivate practitioners to systematically assess all significant AR by CMR in order to improve quantification and optimise clinical management.