High-resolution time-resolved contrast-enhanced MR abdominal and pulmonary angiography using a spiral-TRICKS sequence

Both high spatial resolution and high temporal resolution are desirable for contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (CE-MRA) in order to depict the arterial vasculature. In this work a fast MR pulse sequence (spiral time-resolved imaging with contrast kinetics (Spiral-TRICKS)) with spiral readout in-plane and Cartesian slice encoding was developed whereby the slices are partitioned into multiple regions and acquired in the order used with the TRICKS sequence. The combination of highly efficient spiral sampling with TRICKS acquisition significantly reduced imaging time requirements. A unit second temporal reconstructed frame rate could be achieved for three-dimensional (3D) CE-MRA without undersampling of the spiral trajectories. Image quality was improved through spiral trajectory measurement and field-map correction. Phantom and volunteer studies were performed to demonstrate the feasibility of this technique.