Accelerating phase contrast MR angiography by simplified skipped phase encoding and edge deghosting with array coil...

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Angiography

Background:

• Phase contrast magnetic resonance angiography (PC-MRA) is crucial for visualizing blood flow.
• Accelerating PC-MRA acquisition is essential for reducing scan times and improving patient comfort.
• Existing parallel imaging methods require complex reconstruction algorithms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the feasibility of accelerating PC-MRA using a simplified fast imaging method called S-SPEED-ACE.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of S-SPEED-ACE in reducing scan times while maintaining image quality.

Main Methods:

• Simplified skipped phase encoding and edge deghosting with array coil enhancement (S-SPEED-ACE) was developed by simplifying the SPEED-ACE parallel imaging technique.
• K-space was sparsely sampled using skipped phase encoding and multiple receiver coils.
• A single-layer model, analogous to MIP, was used to reconstruct deghosted images from sparsely sampled data.

Main Results:

• S-SPEED-ACE achieved image acceleration factors of up to 8.3 with four receiver coils.
• Reconstructed PC-MRA images demonstrated comparable quality to those acquired with full k-space sampling.
• Maximum-intensity-projection (MIP) images derived from S-SPEED-ACE reconstructions were consistent with reference MIP images.

Conclusions:

• The S-SPEED-ACE method effectively accelerates PC-MRA by exploiting the inherent signal sparsity of the data.
• The simplified approach improves efficiency and reduces reconstruction complexity compared to traditional methods.
• The feasibility of S-SPEED-ACE for accelerated 3D PC-MRA is demonstrated.