Rapid flow quantification in iliac arteries with spiral phase-contrast MRI

Phase contrast MRI is a powerful tool for blood flow quantification. Conventional cartesian phase contrast sequences require lengthy acquisition on the order of several minutes. Spiral acquisition phase-contrast (PC) MRI is capable of reducing the TR and TE in order to minimize flow dependent artifacts and total imaging time. Despite this, in general, spiral phase contrast sequences suffer from off-resonance artifacts and inconsistent data artifacts. In this work, we show that short interleaved spiral readout trajectories have the capability to obtain high spatio-temporal resolution flow images in the common iliac artery distal to the aortoiliac bifurcation with little or no artifacts and with significant savings in image acquisition time over the Cartesian trajectory. To verify the accuracy, we compare our results with a Conventional cartesian trajectory.