As with other titles in the Pearls and Pitfalls series, this book is a reference for those uncommon clinical diagnoses, artifacts, and other confusing or strange entities that are not typically covered in standard textbooks. This is not a collection of the classic cases that are so often encountered during board review or in continuing education materials. Rather, this title focuses on challenging scenarios and entities that we often encounter in day-to-day clinical practice but are not widely described or discussed in the broader radiology literature.

This collection of cardiovascular pearls and pitfalls is intended for imagers from the trainee level to the senior clinician in practice. It is intended to help one who encounters a cardiovascular finding that just doesn't seem right, but can't exactly put his or her finger on it. These are not your typical “Aunt Minnie” cases, but rather true-to-life cases that can result in real interpretive problems for the radiologist. In this book, we have tried to include cases that we think are clinically relevant and likely to be encountered by the practicing imager, rather than focusing on the rare zebra that may never be encountered within the career of most imagers.

Within, we have included examples of uncommon appearances of common diseases, benign lesions that can be misinterpreted as something more sinister, and pseudolesions due to technical artifacts. We have focused on the modalities of cardiovascular MRI and CT. While there is certainly a wealth of potential pitfalls in cardiac echocardiography, we thought this was beyond the scope of the current publication.

The cases are organized broadly into a mix of anatomic groups, categories of pseudolesions, and types of artifacts. Each case features one or several clinical examples collected by the authors as well as a short explanatory text focusing on the typical imaging findings, clinical relevance, and differential diagnosis.

We have greatly appreciated the opportunity to share our broad clinical experiences through compiling this quite het- erogeneous but highly informative group of cases.