Photo: INCIC Formación
Nov. 4, 2026 — INCIC Formación has introduced SINTCOR, an educational cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) console simulator that lets learners plan and acquire a complete cardiac examination without patients and without scanner time. The first English-language cohort starts in January 2027.
Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Training
CMR training starts the same way for every profession: time at the scanner console. That access is limited and costly. Scanners are busy with patients, CMR centers are few, and in Chile and Latin America distance often makes travel prohibitive. Automated planning is advancing quickly, but it does not replace understanding the fundamentals: knowing how to plan enables quality control, correction of errors and imaging of anatomically difficult hearts.
High fidelity by design, SINTCOR is vendor-neutral. Its anatomical and functional heart model is anatomically and physiologically accurate, refined through more than 600 hours of editing by an imaging cardiologist. Simulated patients are inspired by real patients, and new patients are added every month. All images are simulated; SINTCOR is an educational tool, not a diagnostic one.
A complete CMR examination Learners plan every cardiac view from the localizers onwards, as they would on a scanner, across three groups of sequences:
-
Function: cine SSFP in every cardiac view and 2D phase-contrast aortic flow in systole.
-
Anatomy: localizers, bright-blood (single-shot SSFP) and black-blood (double inversion-recovery) imaging.
-
Tissue characterization: first-pass perfusion at rest and under stress, native and post-contrast T1 mapping (MOLLI), T2 mapping, and inversion-recovery imaging with TI scout for late gadolinium enhancement. T2* mapping and early gadolinium enhancement are in development.
Teaching tools
-
Follow the Teacher: in live classes, each learner sees the instructor's planning line on their own images and repeats it on their own console.
-
Larmor AI: an in-console assistant that answers only from author-reviewed course material and cites the source; questions outside the material are answered by email.
Competencies
SINTCOR is designed for technologists, radiographers, students, engineers, cardiologists and radiologists. It targets Level I competencies (the acquisition and planning step common to all of them) and does not qualify learners to report. It complements supervised hands-on scanner training; it does not replace it.
"Every professional who learns CMR, whether technologist, technician or physician, starts at the console, because that is where the essential concepts are learned and the full path from acquisition to interpretation comes together," said Dr Julián Vega Adauy, cardiologist and author of SINTCOR. "Planning automation is welcome, but operators must understand it well enough to audit it and correct it."
SINTCOR Scholarship
Currently, each cohort includes one free place for a professional from Latin America. Cohorts in Spanish start in December 2026 and in English in January 2027. More information is available at formacion.incic.org/en/sintcor
November 06, 2026 
