Basic techniques of cardiac MR.

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) can be performed routinely due to the continued developments of MR systems, coil technology and sequence techniques, which have considerably shortened acquisition times. Techniques for the physiological monitoring of the patients are available for example, to synchronize the data acquisition with the individual heart cycle. The development of vectorcardiography-based (VCG) triggering improves the detection of the R-waves and reduces the number of misinterpreted ECG events to a minimum. Depending on the clinical question, spin or gradient echo-based sequences with different k-space filling methods are used in CMR. For spin preparation, inversion or saturation recovery techniques are used to suppress the signal of a specific tissue, or to maximize the T1 contrast between different soft tissues. Parallel acquisition methods (PAT) are available to speed up CMR imaging even further.