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Noninvasive assessment of pulmonary artery flow and resistance by cardiac magnetic resonance in congenital heart diseases with unrestricted left-to-right shunt

The accurate measurement of pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR) is crucial in deciding on the operability of children with congenital heart disease and large septal defects. In this paper, we compared the non-invasive measure of relative blood flow to the pulmonary and systemic circulation by MRI with invasive PVR measures performed under MR guided cardiac catheterisation and found that we can predict a PVR in the operable range with very high sensitivity from the non-invasive MRI flow. This technique is now being applied locally and in other clinical centres reducing the need for invasive cardiac catheterisation procedures in this group.