Artifacts in body MR imaging: their appearance and how to eliminate them

A wide variety of artifacts can be seen in clinical MR imaging. This review describes the most important and most prevalent of them, including magnetic susceptibility artifacts and motion artifacts, aliasing, chemical-shift, zipper, zebra, central point, and truncation artifacts. Although the elimination of some artifacts may require a service engineer, the radiologist and MR technologist have the responsibility to recognize MR imaging problems. This review shows the typical MR appearance of the described artifacts, explains their physical basis, and shows the way to solve them in daily practice.