ASSESSMENT OF MYOCARDIAL PERFUSION BY MAG NETIC-RESONANCE-IMAGING - ON THE WAY TO CLINICAL-APPLICATION

Magnetic resonance imaging detects the flow of contrast - enhanced blo od and even allows the quantitative assessment of myocardial perfusion . The clinical application of this method is being held back by the di fficulties in image evaluation and the limitation of standard techniqu es to the acquisition of a single slice per heart beat cycle. Recent d evelopments in scanner hardware as well as in image acquisition techni ques open up the possibility of assessing myocardial perfusion over th e entire heart with a spatial resolution in the range of 2 mm. As an e xample of such a new scanning strategy, a segmented gradient-echo reca lled echo planar imaging sequence with preceding saturation is discuss ed and results in a patient with an infarction are presented. The clin ical use of perfusion assessment covering the entire heart for the dia gnosis of coronary artery disease is enhanced by the flexibility of ma gnetic resonance imaging for the assessment of functional cardiac para meters.