Chest MRI in children: Why bother?

In this issue of Respirology, Montella and colleagues ask this question: How does high‐field chest MRI compare with CT of children with non‐cystic fibrosis (CF) lung disease? In an important extension of the first description of this study where they compared MRI and CT with pulmonary function measurements, the authors evaluated how widely‐used chest CT and almost never‐utilized lung MRI compare for diagnostic imaging of chronic lung disease. Here they show that high‐field (3Tesla as compared with the 1.5Tesla clinical standard) thoracic MRI has high reliability and good‐to‐excellent agreement with CT, definitively answering the important question at hand; their results support more widespread and routine use of MRI in longitudinal monitoring of chronic lung disease, especially in children as well as further optimization and improvement of lung MRI methods. Importantly, non‐CF lung disease accounts for the majority of paediatric pulmonary abnormalities and the increasing prevalence and economic burden related to chronic respiratory disease should motivate the research and development of novel MRI methods for serial and longitudinal imaging.