Pulmonary magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been put forward as a new research and diagnostic tool mainly to overcome the limitations of CT and nuclear medicine study in various pulmonary diseases. However, pulmonary MRI has been difficult to use because of inherently low proton density, a multitude of air-tissue interfaces, which create significant magnetic field distortions and are commonly referred to as susceptibility artifacts, diminishing signal in the lung, and respiratory and/ or cardiac motion artifacts. To overcome these drawbacks, various technical advances made during the last decade have been reported as useful for functional and morphological assessment of various pulmonary diseases. Pulmonary MRI in COPD subjects currently provides not only morphology related, but also pulmonary function related information. It has the potential to replace nuclear medicine studies for the identification of regional pulmonary function and may perform a complementary role in various pulmonary disease assessments and patient managements instead of nuclear medicine study. In addition, pulmonary functional MRI can provide morphological and functional changes of lung structures, circulation, ventilation and oxygen diffusion using qualitative and quantitative assessments. This lecture covers 1) state of the art pulmonary MR techniques for morphological and functional assessment, 2) its clinical applications in COPD and 3) future direction of pulmonary functional MR imaging. We believe that the findings of further basic studies as well as clinical applications of this new technique will validate the real significance of pulmonary MRI for the future of COPD assessment and its usefulness for diagnostic radiology and pulmonary medicine.