In the study of CLP fetal, MRI is able to define the degree of involvement of the posterior palate and the lateral extent of the cleft with higher diagnostic accuracy than US. Furthermore, MRI provides a complete study of the fetal head and biometric development of the facial bones, thus enabling early detection of potential syndromic conditions.

Our preliminary experience demonstrates the feasibility to visualize the fetal heart with routine fetal MRI protocols in particular, by means of acquisition of TrueFISP imaging (morphological study) and real-time cine-MRI (dynamic study), potentially making MRI a second-level tool to add to fetal echocardiography in the prenatal study of congenital cardiac malformations.

Progressive cystic fibrosis (CF) lung disease is the main cause of mortality in CF patients. CF lung disease starts in early childhood. With current standards of care, respiratory function remains largely normal in children and more sensitive outcome measures are needed to monitor early CF lung disease. Chest CT is currently the most sensitive imaging modality to monitor pulmonary structural changes in children and adolescents with CF. To quantify structural lung disease reliably among multiple centres, standardisation of chest CT protocols is needed. SCIFI CF (Standardised Chest Imaging Framework for Interventions and Personalised Medicine in CF) was founded to characterise chest CT image quality and radiation doses among 16 participating European CF centres in 10 different countries. We aimed to optimise CT protocols in children and adolescents among several CF centres. A large variety was found in CT protocols, image quality and radiation dose usage among the centres. However, the performance of all CT scanners was found to be very similar, when taking spatial resolution and radiation dose into account. We conclude that multicentre standardisation of chest CT in children and adolescents with CF can be achieved for future clinical trials.

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) with ADC mapping can be used in the evaluation of fetal renal parenchyma and may become a tool of assessing function of the fetal kidney by means of measurement of renal tissue ADC values.