Objective: To analyze the usefulness of magnetic resonance for the morphological diagnosis in complex congenital cardiopathies and compare it with the transthoracic echocardiogram.
Method: We included 45 patients with clinical suspicion of severe congenital cardiopathy. A magnetic resonance and a transthoracic echocardiogram were performed and the anatomy and size of the cardiac cavities were compared. Descriptive statistics were used and Bland-Altman test was used to analyze concordance between both methods.
Results: There were no significant differences in the measures obtained with either method, except for the left ventricle ejection fraction (66.56 +/- 9.47 with ECO vs 52.32 +/- 13.85 with MR, p = 0.0001) and for diameter of the left branch of the pulmonary artery (9.77 +/- 6.80 with ECO vs 12.83 +/- 8.46 with MR, p = 0.05). The sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values of MR were high to analyze the AV and VA connection, but not for the atrial sinus and the venous drainages (pulmonary and systemic). Concordance of ejection fraction measures, McGoon index, and size of VD revealed few extreme values.
Conclusions: MR and ECO are similar for the morphological diagnosis of severe congenital cardiopathies, but MR can be better than ECO for the visualization of extracardiac structures.