Quick Overview

Ghosting artifacts are in the most cases caused by movements (e.g., respiratory motion, bowel motion, arterial pulsations, swallowing, and heartbeat) and appear in the phase encoding direction.

Ghosting artifacts can be reduced by respiratory and cardiac triggering, the use of breath holding pulse sequences, flow compensation or presaturation pulses, depending on their origin. To reduce bowel motion also pharmaceuticals, such as glucagon or scopolamine are useful. This will decrease artifacts from both peristalsis and breathing.

See also Motion Artifact, Phase Encoded Motion Artifact, Cardiac Motion Artifact, and Artifact Reduction - Motion.

Magnetic resonance imaging of the heart is a diagnostic MRI procedure that is useful to evaluate the structures, the function and viability of the heart and the major blood vessels.

See also Cardiac MRI, Cardiovascular Imaging, MRA, Cardiac Stent, Myocardial Late Enhancement and Coronary Angiography.

Lantheus Medical Imaging is a worldwide leader in medical imaging, with headquarters in North Billerica, Massachusetts, and nearly 700 employees worldwide with offices in Puerto Rico, Canada, and Australia.
The product portfolio includes ABLAVAR™ (gadofosveset trisodium) a blood pool contrast agent for magnetic resonance angiography MRA, Cardiolite® (Kit for the preparation of Technetium Tc99m Sestamibi), a cardiac perfusion imaging agent and DEFINITY® Vial for (Perflutren Lipid Microsphere) injectable suspension, the leading cardiac ultrasound contrast agent in the US.

MRI Contrast Agents:

Lung imaging is furthermore a challenge in MRI because of the predominance of air within the lungs and associated susceptibility issues as well as low signal to noise of the inflated lung parenchyma. Cardiac and respiratory triggered or breath hold sequences allow diagnostic imaging, however a comparable image quality with computed tomography is still difficult to achieve.
Assumptions for lung MRI:
The current trends in MRI are the use of new imaging technologies and increasingly powerful magnetic fields. Among these technologies are parallel imaging techniques as well as ventilation agents like hyperpolarized helium for the use as an inert inhalational contrast agent to study lung ventilation properties. With hyperpolarized gases clear images of the lungs can be obtained without using a large magnetic field (see also back projection imaging). Single shot sequences (e.g. TSE or Half Fourier Acquisition Single Shot Turbo Spin Echo HASTE) used in lung MR imaging benefits from parallel imaging techniques due to reduced relaxation time effects during the echo train and therefore reduced image blurring as well as reduced motion artifacts.
In the future, more effective contrast agents may provide an alternative solution to the need for high field MRI. Dynamic contrast enhanced MRI perfusion has demonstrated a potential in the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism or to characterize lung cancer and mediastinal tumors. 3D contrast enhanced magnetic resonance angiography of the thoracic vessel.

See also the related poll result: 'MRI will have replaced 50% of x-ray exams by'

From Hitachi Medical Systems America, Inc.;
because of its dependability, the MRP-7000™ remains popular more than a decade after the first U.S. system was shipped. This system maintains a high resale value, what has made it one of the most sought-after scanners on the used MRI equipment market.