Fig. 5

Inferior Blooming artifact. Example illustrating the challenge in assessing whether the inferior myocardial signal attenuation seen arrowed on the T2* colourmap (a, scale 0-60 ms) is true or caused by artifact. Drawing a region of interest (b) and examining the decay curve (c) along with visualising individual echos (d 1-8) helps determine that this is a ‘blooming artifact’ from outside the heart is seen to influence echos 4-8. These can be manually removed, forming a new decay curve (e) with improvement in curve fitting (R² value), although with fewer fitting points