[Determining heart muscle perfusion by magnetic resonance tomography progressing to clinical application]

Magnetic resonance imaging detects the flow of contrast-enhanced blood and even allows the quantitative assessment of myocardial perfusion. The clinical application of this method is being held back by the difficulties in image evaluation and the limitation of standard techniques to the acquisition of a single slice per heart beat cycle. Recent developments in scanner hardware as well as in image acquisition techniques open up the possibility of assessing myocardial perfusion over the entire heart with a spatial resolution in the range of 2 mm. As an example of such a new scanning strategy, a segmented gradient-echo recalled echo planar imaging sequence with preceding saturation is discussed and results in a patient with an infarction are presented. The clinical use of perfusion assessment covering the entire heart for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease is enhanced by the flexibility of magnetic resonance imaging for the assessment of functional cardiac parameters.