Image quality and artefacts

Good and reproducible image quality is essential for clinical diagnosis. Although image quality can be defined in numerous ways, signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise ratios are often used as indicators. Despite our best efforts, image artefacts are part and parcel of CMR imaging and are sometimes unavoidable. Image artefacts can be caused by patients (e.g. motion, chemical shift artefacts), image acquisition and reconstruction (e.g. foldover artefacts), or equipment/external interferences (e.g. radiofrequency leakage). The most common image artefacts encountered in cardiac imaging and strategies to avoid or reduce them are discussed in this chapter.