MR imaging of the finger: Correlation with normal anatomic sections

The imaging evaluation of the hand to date has primarily consisted of plain-film radiography. Although the plain film yields accurate information about the bones, it gives poor or indirect information about the cartilage and soft tissues. MR imaging yields a wealth of information about the soft tissues of the musculoskeletal system. Only a small amount of work on the MR appearance of the finger has been published, mainly because of the considerable demands on the imaging system by the small dimensions involved. To perform this investigation of normal finger anatomy, we wrote software for our MR system that permits the acquistion of images with a 4-cm field of view and we built a highly optimized local coil to obtain a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to support this small field of view.