However, the suboptimal penetration of ultrasound is a limitation, especially in adults after cardiovascular surgery.
Transthoracic echocardiography remains the first-line approach to imaging the hearts of patients with adult congenital heart disease (ACHD), providing a relatively rapid and comprehensive evaluation of anatomy, function, and hemodynamic indices in most patients. 1 It can provide biventricular functional assessment, flow measurement, myocardial viability assessment, angiography, and more. Kilner, in Diagnosis and Management of Adult Congenital Heart Disease (Second Edition), 2011 IntroductionĬardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) gives unrestricted access to the heart and great vessels noninvasively and without ionizing radiation. That is, by timing each phase encoding step in a magnetic resonance (MR) acquisition to a particular point in the electrocardiographic cycle of the heart, reconstructed images are temporally coherent. ECG gating acts by applying a timing signal coincident with cardiac motion to image acquisition. Thus, the most important difference between cardiac and other-organ magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the application of electrocardiogram (ECG) gating to the acquisition pulse sequences.
The use of CMRI imaging lies in the adaptation of motion suppression techniques to cancel out complex cardiac contractile motion. CMRI is already considered the procedure of choice for quantification of ventricular volume and mass, as well as in the evaluation of myocardial viability, pericardial disease, and intracardiac and pericardiac masses, for imaging the right ventricle and pulmonary vessels, and for assessing many forms of congenital heart disease, especially after corrective surgery. CMRI has improved substantially over the past decade, and it is now entering the mainstream of diagnostic cardiac imaging.
Boxt, in Cardiac Imaging (Third Edition), 2009 INTRODUCTIONĬardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) provides reproducible morphologic and functional information for the evaluation and management of patients with cardiovascular disease.