Peripheral MR angiography

Peripheral arterial occlusive disease is a chronic and progressive disease with a reported incidence rate from 4.5% to 8.8% in men over 55 years of age. The diagnosis is usually made clinically, but for treatment planning and control, imaging of the peripheral arteries is required. Since its introduction in 1994, contrast-enhanced MR angiography has demonstrated a high diagnostic confidence and has replaced the invasive intra-arterial DSA, which is still the current gold standard for many different indications. For the peripheral arteries, clinical use of MR angiography was hampered for some years by the unsolved problem of the large imaging volume and the small diameter of the distal arteries. However, since the availability of ultra-fast high-gradient sequences and the possibility of moving-bed imaging, contrast-enhanced MR angiography, over the last few years, has shown its enormous potential and high accuracy in the diagnosis and follow-up of patients suffering from peripheral arterial occlusive disease. Exciting innovations in hardware and software allows very fast, very accurate, and very robust noninvasive imaging of the peripheral arteries, and both treatment planning as well as follow-up can be performed using contrast-enhanced MR angiography. The following review introduces the basic concepts of peripheral MR angiography--focusing on contrast enhanced imaging--and presents the different techniques as well as some potential limitations and how they could be solved. Finally, this article provides a look into the already-begun future of peripheral contrast-enhanced MR angiography with hybrid and combination techniques.