Established fields of studies tend to develop a certain routine of thinking, which evolves into traditions. As the time passes it may become difficult to see, which of the basic commonly accepted concepts are based on solid facts. This presentation discusses a number of established concepts in MR imaging with a goal of not giving answers but rather of inviting the audience to reconsider some of the basic, seemingly universal principles.
Many established fields of studies tend to develop a certain routine of thinking. Such routine then evolves into traditions of defining elementary principles and postulating basic concepts from which more advances concepts are derived. As the time passes it may become difficult to see, which of these are based on solid facts and can be considered as universal truths, in contrast to those, which at times were considered as acceptable simplifications but evolved in to a common knowledge. This presentation discusses a number of established concepts in MRI, namely: whether magnets need to be steady; whether the spatial encoding is done with the linear gradients; whether spherical harmonics are best for magnetic field description and shimming; whether MR k-space always contains spatial frequency components of the imaged object; or whether pulse sequence programming needs to be tedious and complex. The goal of this talk is not to give answers but rather to push the attendees out of the comfortable zone by showing that many of the commonly accepted ways of thinking about the MR imaging process are related to myths and dogmas rather than to scientific facts.