The state of MR application in medicine

With its 1,123 scientific papers and 1,900 attendants, the annual congress of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (SMRM), New York, surpassed all previous events dedicated to this subject. The technical papers on MRI contained a profusion of suggestions to improve image production and image quality; fewer papers, however, reported on spectacularly novel techniques. Major improvements were reported for MR angiography, for elimination of movement artifacts by selective saturation of the adjacent regions, for echo planar imaging at a field strength of T2, and for image processing. A new feature were a number of papers on the application and benefit of MR susceptibility scans. The clinical papers mainly discussed the diagnostic value of this method. Paediatric and traumatological studies were strongly represented for the first time. In MR spectroscopy, localization of the region under examination was a topic much discussed again. A 4-T-whole-body system was presented for the first time. Discussions of applications involved a very great number of metabolic studies along with malignity-specific components in the high field proton spectrum whose safe verification requires substantial investigations still. (orig.)