Cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) or cardiac MRI is a medical imaging technology that provides a noninvasive diagnostic assessment of the cardiovascular system. Cardiac MRI helps to achieve improved diagnosis and further guide management of treatment of patients with heart disease. A major benefit of this particular imaging modality is that it uses no radiation.
“For some patients, using cardiac MRI makes sense,” says Karen Ordovas, MD, MAS, director of Cardiac Imaging in the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. “Let’s say you have a patient who is 20 years old with cardiomyopathy, a chronic heart problem. This requires serial imaging for the rest of the patient’s life. Even if a CT scan is done with low dose protocols, cardiac MRI is a reproducible method that has no radiation. This is important.”
“I wouldn’t want to stress that
