[Colin2B (OP)]

You can use echoplanar imaging to freeze motion, but the imafge quality is generally poor. Gated acquisition can be used to capture high quality images of repetitive motion: we have some excellent movies of an athlete's heart valve performance when running on a treadmill in an upright MRI.

Interesting post from Alan.
I have a non-professional interest in exercise physiology. One of standard tests of heart performance is the exercise stress test on a treadmill, it is not a perfect test although heart rate recovery after the test does seem to be a good indicator of heart health.

How good is the upright MRI at detecting problems and is it likely to become the gold standard for diagnosis of heart prblems?

[Tomassci]

Heart is complicated. You can use fMRI to study how heart does (not) work. But in some cases this is useless.

[alancalverd]

How good is the upright MRI at detecting problems and is it likely to become the gold standard for diagnosis of heart prblems?

The athlete's heart valve video was, note, an athlete's heart! IIRC the guy was jogging for most of an hour to produce textbook-quality images.

Diagnosis usually begins with symptoms- pain, breathlessness, pulse anomaly, claudication, cyanosis, death.....and if I had any acute symptoms of heart disease I wouldn't want to stand up in an MRI machine for an hour nor even lie down in a fast-imaging MRI unit. I'd like an immediate electrocardiogram, please, with a side helping of ultrasound and a damn good digital-subtraction cardiac x-ray system with angioplasty for dessert.

Some old friends at the Brompton Hospital made a superb cardiac MRI scanner that really could capture gated images of the coronary artery and show atherosclerosis - definite gold standard diagnostic for chronic conditions but it never became commercial.