Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging - History and Nomenclature

History and Nomenclature

The phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) was first described in molecular beams (1938) and bulk matter (1946), work later acknowledged by the award of a joint Nobel prize in 1952. Further investigation laid out the principles of relaxation times leading to nuclear spectroscopy. In 1973, the first simple NMR image was published and the first medical imaging in 1977, entering the clinical arena in the early 1980s. In 1984, NMR medical imaging was renamed MRI. Initial attempts to image the heart were confounded by respiratory and cardiac motion, solved by using cardiac ECG gating, faster scan techniques and breath hold imaging. Increasingly sophisticated techniques were developed including cine imaging and techniques to characterise heart muscle as normal or abnormal (fat infiltration, oedematous, iron loaded, acutely infarcted or fibrosed).

As MRI became more complex and application to cardiovascular imaging became more sophisticated, the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, SCMR was set up (1996) with an academic journal, (JCMR) in 1999, which is going open source in 2008. In a move analogous to the development of ‘echocardiography’ from cardiac ultrasound, the term ‘Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance’ (CMR) was proposed and has gained acceptance as the name for the field.