Valvular Heart Disease

The assessment of valvular heart disease by cardiac MRI has changed little over the last decade. However, with the increasing use and development of percutaneous valve interventions (transcatheter and minimally-invasive surgery), there is an increasing need to use cardiac MRI to define which patients will benefit from treatment, which patients are suitable for a specific treatment and how patients will respond to their treatments. As cardiac MRI is the best available in-vivo test to define great vessel flow and ventricular volumes, whilst at the same time providing beautiful, high-resolution 3D/4D anatomical images of the heart, it may become the imaging modalities of choice for these assessments. Importantly, as long-term outcome data is acquired, this ability of cardiac MRI to accurately measure physiological parameters will help us define when to treat patients, in particular asymptomatic patients with valvular regurgitation. Finally, the development and increasing use of high spatio-temporal real-time data for acquiring flow and function information will enable MR scans to be performed over a short time period (e.g. 15 mins) comparable to the time it takes to perform a full echocardiogram!