Background In bright blood imaging, partial volume averaging of small moving intracavitary structures and surrounding bright blood often degrades the depiction of such morphology. Therefore, structures including papillary muscles, trabeculations, and intracardiac masses are better visualized with dark blood (DB) techniques. DB imaging also provides better image contrast for low signal structure...

Cardiomyopathy is a heterogeneous group of disorders of varying etiology. Heart failure from systolic and/or diastolic cardiac dysfunction is common to all. Certain disorders are distin‐ guished by life threatening arrhythmia. Onset of symptoms may be acute or progress from preclinical to symptomatic state over time and at a variable rate. Early recognition permits therapeutic intervention ther...

Introduction T2-weighted (T2w) cardiac MR imaging has established reputation as a sensitive technique to depict myocardial edema related to acute infarction. Together with delayed enhancement technique, T2w demonstrated valuable clinical potentials to differentiate acute damage from chronic infarction [1]. To minimize the myocardial signal loss caused by through-plane motion, T2w can be perform...

Background Cardiac motion is a crucial problem in in vivo diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the human heart. Despite its importance, the effects of cardiac motion on diffusion tensor parameters of the human heart in vivo have not been well established, mainly because of large signal loss. Recently, an efficient method was proposed that acquires cardiac diffusion weighted (DW) images at differen...

The salamander axolotl is capable of complete regeneration of amputated heart tissue. However, non-invasive imaging tools for assessing its cardiac function were so far not employed. In this study, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging is introduced as a non-invasive technique to image heart function of axolotls. Three axolotls were imaged with magnetic resonance imaging using a retrospectively ga...

PURPOSE To evaluate if cardiac magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) can measure increased stiffness in patients with cardiac amyloidosis. Myocardial tissue stiffness plays an important role in cardiac function. A noninvasive quantitative imaging technique capable of measuring myocardial stiffness could aid in disease diagnosis, therapy monitoring, and disease prognostic strategies. We recently...

In patients with heart valve disease, echocardiography is the mainstay for diagnosis, assessment and serial surveillance. However, other modalities, notably cardiac MRI and CT, are used if echocardiographic imaging is suboptimal but can also give complementary information to improve assessment of the valve lesion and cardiac compensation to aid the timing of surgery and determine risk. This sta...

Microvascular abnormalities of the coronary circulation are present in several cardiac disorders, are associated with risk factors, and may be present in systemic disease. For the diagnosis and quantification of microvascular dysfunction, non invasive imaging techniques can be used. This paper will highlight the roles of exercise ECG, single photon emission computed tomography, echocardiography...

introduction: poor sensitivity and poor signal to noise ratio because of low injected thallium dose and presence of scattered photons are the main problems in using thallium in scintigraphic imaging of the heart. scattered photons are the main cause of degrading the contrast and resolution in spect imaging that result in error in quantification. thallium decay is very complicated and photons ar...

BACKGROUND Transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) is a widely used cardiac imaging technique that all cardiologists should be able to perform competently. Traditionally, TTE competence has been assessed by unstructured observation or in test situations separated from daily clinical practice. An instrument for assessment of clinical TTE technical proficiency including a global rating score and a c...