Recent developments and prospects in high-field MR.

During recent years much effort has been put into detecting and classifying disease states, and MR imaging has been a very important tool in this respect. Up to now, increasing the gradient strength has been the only strategy for meeting the increasing demands of advanced diagnostic imaging applications. This strategy is limited by physical, economic, and medical considerations: increasing gradient strength is technically difficult, and is associated with significant hardware costs and with the risk of inducing unwanted side effects such as peripheral neurostimulation.