Technical Aspects of Contrast-enhanced MR Angiography: Current Status and New Applications

This article is based on a presentation at the meeting of the Japanese Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in September 2016. The purpose is to review the technical developments which have contributed to the current status of contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (CE-MRA) and to indicate related emerging areas of study. Technical developments include MRI physics-based innovations as well as improvements in MRI engineering. These have collectively addressed not only early issues of timing and venous suppression but more importantly have led to an improvement in spatiotemporal resolution of CE-MRA of more than two orders of magnitude compared to early results. This has allowed CE-MRA to be successfully performed in virtually all vascular territories of the body. Contemporary technical areas of study include improvements in implementation of high rate acceleration, extension of high performance first-pass CE-MRA across multiple imaging stations, expanded use of compressive sensing techniques, integration of Dixon-based fat suppression into CE-MRA sequences, and application of CE-MRA sequences to dynamic-contrast-enhanced perfusion imaging.