Investigating intrinsic myocardial mechanics: The role of MR tagging, velocity phase mapping, and diffusion imaging

Assessment of myocardial mechanics is an integral part of understanding and predicting heart disease. This review covers the two most common magnetic resonance (MR) methods used to measure myocardial motion: myocardial taggin g and myocardial velocity mapping. Myocardial tagging has been well establi shed in clinical research, despite its time-consuming postprocessing proced ure. Myocardial velocity mapping uses the phase shifts of the spins to enco de the velocity into the MR signal. This means that once the myocardial con tours have been segmented, the data can be automatically processed to obtai n quantitative measurements. Diffusion MR also has found applications in ca rdiac imaging, with preliminary results of myocardial fiber architecture be ing obtained recently. These three different MR techniques have provided va luable insights into the assessment of intrinsic cardiac mechanics. (C) 200 0 Wiley-Liss, Inc.