ABSTRACT
The instrumentation needed for cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) consists of a standard clinical scanner with several notable enhancements. The physical principles governing image acquisition are essentially the same irrespective of the particular application. However, in cardiovascular applications, imaging a moving target, be it the myocardium or the blood (as in angiographic studies), requires certain enhancements to improve the acquisition speed, the image reconstruction speed, and the ability to minimize motion and susceptibility artifacts. We will treat each of these needs in the following descriptions of the relevant scanner components.
