Figure 2

Correlation between T2* and T2 drawn from the 132 thalassemia patients. The vertical broken line represents the threshold myocardial T2* value to distinguish abnormal and normal patients. The horizontal broken lines represent the normal reference ranges for myocardial T2 from previous published data. The whole data is fitted by a quadratic curve (curved line, R2 = 0.938). All data of T2* ≤ 20 ms is fitted linearly (straight line, R2 = 0.885). This original study demonstrated that mrocardial T2* correlated linearly with T2 measurements in patients with iron overload, which suggests that both T2* and T2 can be used for the reliable assessment of iron overload in the heart.