Potential for Rapid and Cost‐Effective Cardiac Magnetic Resonance in the Developing (and Developed) World

ardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is a comprehensive imaging modality that can be used to assess ventricular morphology, function, tissue characteristics, perfusion, flow, and scar.It offers a plethora of useful information for assessing both diagnosis and prognosis in patients with cardiomyopathies. 1 However, it is less utilized worldwide than other cardiac imaging modalities, primarily because of its lack of availability in less developed countries.Even in the developed world, it is less available beyond academic centers and high-volume practices.The length of the examination (up to an hour) is another potential drawback for its use in underdeveloped countries.Several approaches have been taken in recent years to overcome this.A major engineering push in CMR technique development is to make the image acquisition faster, primarily through methods of faster image reconstruction. 2Parallel imaging, which reconstructs images using data acquired from multiple surface coils, has been in use for over a decade, but the speedup factor for this is only 2-to 3-fold.Compressed sensing hastens reconstruction by using fewer lines of data, expanding upon CMR image data that are "compressible."Compressed sensing remains in development and sequences are not yet used clinically.Other novel approaches include CMR multitasking, which in theory enables the acquisition of multiple types of data without electrocardiographic triggering or breath holds in one 15-minute examination. 3The issue with the latter 2 approaches is that they require the latest scanner models with updated and advanced software packages.These are generally not available in the developing world and thus these solutions are really aimed only at the developed world at present.