Flow-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging

A new technique for detecting blood flow in magnetic resonance imaging is proposed. This technique is tailored to enhance areas containing flow while suppressing static and nonsignal areas with the objective of optimizing the contrast of vascularized tumors. Unlike flow phase imaging, in-plane flow directionality (parallel versus antiparallel to applied flow gradient) is removed by the proposed method to reduce phase cancellation of flow signals. This signal loss is apt to occur in instances of complicated vascularity patterns consisting of many small vessels having multiple flow directions. The new flow-enhanced imaging method is compared to flow phase imaging by computer simulation of simple objects containing many small vessels. The results indicate that flow-enhanced imaging yields significantly greater detectability of regions of complicated small-vessel patterns than phase imaging.