Magnetic resonance imaging became clinical in 1981 and since that time, has spread in the United States, Europe and Japan like wild fire. The tremendous advantages of the method consisting of safety, superb soft tissue contrast resolution, the ability to study flow, the ability to image in any plane or acquire data in 3D and an almost infinite array of sequences capable of distinguishing between disease and normal tissue, normal and abnormal blood flow make it incomparable for the diagnosis and study of multiple diseases and is particularly valuable in studying the heart and major vessels. The authors of this book have understood that the secret of success of MR imaging in the study of the heart is to combine the knowledge of anatomy of the heart, the coronary vessels, the pericardium and large vessels with the intricacies of MR imaging. This is why they go deeply into the basic principles of NMR, starting from the essentials and going then into detailed techniques of acquiring images from traditional spin echo to gradient echo and ultra fast imaging approaches, such as the multi shot and EPI. The flow phenomena are also discussed in detail from flow and magnetic field gradients diastolic pseudogating.
Reviews
' ....this book should be useful for students reading cardiac anatomy and for those involved with cardiac imaging in general, and cardiovascular MRI in particular. 'International Journal of Cardiology 37 1992
Authors and Affiliations
Departments of Internal Medicine and Radiology, University of Louvain Medical School, Brussels, Belgium
