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MR Pulse Sequences: What Every Radiologist Wants to Know but Is Afraid to Ask¹

¹ From the Department of Medical Imaging, University of Toronto, Fitzgerald Building, 150 College St, Room 112, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3E2 (R.B., A.R.M., J.S., C.M., M.C., S.S., T.P.R.); and Department of Medical Imaging, Sunnybrook and Women’s College Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (R.B., G.L., R.P., S.T., A.R.M., J.S., C.M., M.C., S.S., A.N.). Recipient of an Excellence in Design award for an education exhibit at the 2004 RSNA Annual Meeting. Received March 24, 2005; revision requested May 12 and received June 7; accepted July 6. All authors have no financial relationships to disclose. Address correspondence to R.B. (e-mail: richard.bitar{at}utoronto.ca).

The use of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is growing exponentially, in part because of the excellent anatomic and pathologic detail provided by the modality and because of recent technologic advances that have led to faster acquisition times. Radiology residents now are introduced in their 1st year of training to the MR pulse sequences routinely used in clinical imaging, including various spin-echo, gradient-echo, inversion-recovery, echo-planar imaging, and MR angiographic sequences. However, to make optimal use of these techniques, radiologists also need a basic knowledge of the physics of MR imaging, including T1 recovery, T2 and T2* decay, repetition time, echo time, and chemical shift effects. In addition, an understanding of contrast weighting is very helpful to obtain better depiction of specific tissues for the diagnosis of various pathologic processes.

© RSNA, 2006

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