Joao Luiz Azevedo Carvalho1,2, Jon Fredrik Nielsen2,3, Krishna Shrinivas Nayak2
1Electrical Engineering, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, DF, Brazil; 2Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; 3Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Wall shear stress is believed to influence the development of atherosclerosis, but there is currently no gold standard for its in vivo measurement. High-resolution phase contrast is inadequate due to partial volume effects, long scan-times, and low SNR. We evaluate the use of spiral Fourier velocity encoding for assessing wall shear rate in the carotid arteries. The shear rate is estimated using the method described by Frayne and Rutt MRM 34:378-387, which estimates the velocity profile within a voxel from its velocity distribution. The proposed method is validated using simulated data from computational fluid dynamics, and demonstrated in vivo at 3T.