[Cardiac MRI in adults: principles, current and future clinical applications].

If cardiac MRI have been used for a long time to study cardiac morphology only, more recent developments allow the assessment of flow, perfusion and contractile function. Breath-hold segmented and MR tagging sequences offer new capabilities to explore regional functional consequences, of particular interest to characterize post-ischemic injury after myocardial infarction, representing an alternative technique to echocardiography or nuclear medicine. Combined with pharmacologic stress test, MR cardiac imaging offer a more precise characterization of myocardial perfusion and contractile function. If MR coronary angiography requires further developments, cardiac MRI have the potential to represent in the future the only imaging modality allowing combined assessment of coronary vessels, myocardial perfusion and contractile function.