With this magnetic resonance angiography technique flowing blood appears dark.
MR black blood techniques have been developed for cardiovascular imaging to improve segmentation of myocardium from the blood pool. Black blood MRA techniques decrease the signal from blood with reference to the myocardium and make it easier to perform cardiac chamber segmentation.
ECG gated spin echo sequences with presaturation pulses for magnetization preparation will show strong intravascular signal loss due to flow effects when appropriate imaging conditions including spatial presaturation are used. The sequence use the flow void effect as blood passes rapidly through the selected slice.
For dark blood preparation, a pair of nonselective and selective 180° inversion pulses are used, followed by a long inversion time to null signal from inflowing blood. A second selective inversion pulse can also be applied with short inversion time to null the fat signal. These in cardiac imaging used black blood techniques are referred to as double inversion recovery T1 measurement turbo spin echo or fast spin echo, and double-inversion recovery STIR.

Blood pool agents (intravascular contrast agents) remain in the blood for a prolonged time compared with conventional contrast agents, which diffuse quickly into the interstitial space. Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), cardiovascular imaging, or contrast enhanced MRIs are possible over an hour or more. This advantage over conventional MRI contrast media allows also higher resolution MRA of several territories using respiratory or cardiac gating techniques with a single contrast bolus.
Different types of blood pool contrast agents:
Blood pool MRI contrast agents with their longer intravascular circulation can be designed to be targeted to necrotic myocardium, to assess myocardial viability, or tumor directed to provide better diagnostic information for various tumors. A disadvantage of the use of blood pool agents for MRA is that the separation of arteries and veins is more difficult because they are present in both and the overlapping of those vessels is disturbing. This can be solved by e.g. different MIP segmentation algorithms.

See also Necrosis Avid Contrast Agent, Tumor Specific Agents, Feruglose, Gadofosveset Trisodium (Vasovist), Ultrasmall Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide and Contrast Medium.

The cardiac anatomy is complex, and cardiac structures have different appearances depending on the imaging plane. The most useful imaging planes are those parallel and perpendicular to the cardiac axes. The short axis (SA), vertical long cardiac axis (VLA - 2 chamber view - 2C) and horizontal long axis (HLA - 4 chamber view - 4C) are the standard views in cardiovascular imaging. The orientation of a heart is described relative to an imaginary line drawn from the base of the heart (valve plane) to the apex.
Obtaining cine images in these double-oblique planes requires the use of multiple localizing MRI sequences and knowledge of the cardiac anatomy. The long axis image plane is determined by the line that runs from the apex of the heart to a midpoint at the base of the heart, often taken to be midway between the mitral valve leaflets. The short axis is planned perpendicular to the long axis view.

(DE FGRE, Dual/FFE, DE FFE) Simultaneously acquired in and out of phase TE gradient echo images. To quantitatively measure the signal intensity differences between out of phase and in phase images the parameters should be the same except for the TE.
The chemical shift artifact appearing on the out-of-phase image allows for the detection of lipids in the liver or adrenal gland, such as diffuse fatty infiltration, focal fatty infiltration, focal fatty sparing, benign adrenocortical masses and intracellular lipids within a hepatocellar neoplasm, where spin echo and fat suppression techniques are not as sensitive. Specific pathologies that have been reported include liver lipoma, angiomyolipoma, myelolipoma, metastatic liposarcoma, teratocarcinoma, melanoma, haemorrhagic neoplasm and metastatic choriocarcinoma.

(MSI) The combination of biomagnetic field detection and MR imaging into a merged data set. Most applications of MSI involve the combined use of MRI and measurement of magnetic fields created by electric currents in the brain, so-called magnetoencephalography MEG.
MEG allows calculation of the source of the measured biomagnetic fields, and thereby localization of many regional brain functions, such as mapping of the sensorimotor, auditory and visual cortex and also localization of epileptogenic foci. The MEG coordinate system is defined by anatomical landmarks, which are easily identified also with MRI, making it possible to align the 3D MEG data with the 3D MR image data. The resulting magnetic source images show the spatial relationships between the functional area provided by MEG and the neighboring anatomy and pathology, both provided by MRI.
Cardiac applications of MSI are also being explored. The electric currents in the myocardium create extrathoracic magnetic fields and the source of these fields may be calculated by the same principles as those used in MEG. Possible cardiac applications include mapping of arrhythmogenic sites prior to ablation therapy.