Related Experiment Videos
[Flow contrast behavior in fast MR angiography with an ECG-triggered, slice-selective inversion recovery turbo-FLASH
R Urhahn1, M Drobnitzky, R W Günther
1Klinik für Radiologische Diagnostik, RWTH Aachen.
Purpose:
To optimise and evaluate fast "inflow"-based contrast-prepared gradient-echo magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) of blood vessels with pulsatile flow.
Material And Method:
We used a standard 2-D Turbo-FLASH sequence with an acquisition time of 0.9 s and a slice-selective hyperbolic secant inversion (SSIR) pulse for contrast preparation. Trigger delay and inversion time were systematically varied.
Results:
Abdominal blood vessels of volunteers showed high signal intensity compared to stationary tissue without pulsatile artifacts. However, depending on cardiac cycle and inversion time, venous vessels in particular exhibited a periodic signal drop by maximum 70% of the peak value. Using optimised parameters SSIR turbo-FLASH images of patients could be obtained with high flow contrast between normal and pathological structures.
Conclusion:
With ECG triggering SSIR Turbo-FLASH MRA enables fast imaging of pulsatile vessels with optimised flow contrast.