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(Circulation. 2008;118:109-112.)
© 2008 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

Extending the Frontiers of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance

Juerg Schwitter, MD, FESC

From the Cardiac MR Center, University Hospital Zurich and Children’s University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland.

Correspondence to Juerg Schwitter, MD, FESC, University Hospital Zurich, Cardiology Clinics, Raemistrasse 100, CH-8091 Zurich, Switzerland. E-mail juerg.schwitter@usz.ch

Key Words: Editorials • contrast media • imaging • magnetic resonance imaging • metabolism • spectroscopy

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

	Introduction

 
Inflammation is a common reaction in biological systems, which develops, for example, to defend the body against infectious agents, to repair tissue, and to respond to ischemic insults. It can also be a disease process in itself, as in autoimmune diseases. Flögel et al¹ describe a novel, elegant, and noninvasive approach to inflammatory mechanisms at a cellular level. The noninvasive nature of their strategy is of paramount importance. In particular, it allows for a series of repetitive measurements to be obtained from the same animal and thus yields information on the evolution of the inflammatory process without destruction of the system under investigation. This is almost impossible to achieve with invasive techniques.

Article p 140

Flögel et al elegantly exploit a primary mode of action of inflammatory cells (ie, phagocytosis of potentially harmful agents), which in this case happens to be a magnetic resonance (MR)–active contrast medium. Another remarkable aspect of their work is the use of the naturally occurring stable fluorine isotope ¹⁹F as the MR-active nucleus for imaging. Why is this unique? This ¹⁹F-MR imaging strategy takes advantage of the fact that after administration of ¹⁹F-containing compounds, any signal detected in the body via MR imaging (MRI) is emanating from the injected contrast medium (ie, an extraordinary contrast-to-noise ratio [CNR] is present, because no background signal from the body is detected by ¹⁹F-MR imaging). If the MR scanner is thereafter tuned to the ¹H resonance frequency, conventional MRI occurs, and all morphological and functional information on the organ . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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