AuntMinnie.com MRI Radiology Insider

Dear MRI Insider,

International researchers have dominated the MR scene recently with a host of studies on the modality’s value in various clinical settings.

First, radiologists from the University of Essen in Germany and the University Hospital in Groningen, the Netherlands, praised dobutamine stress MR for its ability to ascertain myocardial ischemia in patients with suspected or known coronary artery disease. In a second study, the same German group used contrast-enhanced MR to look for late enhancement in patients with coronary artery disease and impaired left ventricular function. You can read the details on these studies here.

Shifting from the heart to the pulmonary system, radiologists at the University Hospitals in Basel, Switzerland believe they have determined the optimum dose for 3-D MR angiography of pulmonary circulation. Click here to learn more about their technique. From Switzerland we travel to France, where radiologists are advocating MRI for detecting and quantifying hepatic iron stores.

Finally, are you up for a new hobby? Or perhaps looking to do a little neurological refurbishing? If so, juggling might be just the activity for you. According to the results of a whole-brain MR study, the act of continually throwing objects in the air and then catching them brings perceptible changes in the brain’s gray matter. Investigators at the University of Regensburg in Germany believe their study shows that the new stimuli can actually alter the brain's structure.