MR Microscopy of Human Skin Vasculature in Vivo at 3 Tesla Using a Small Copper Surface Coil

Elmar Laistler¹, Ewald Moser¹

We show that using small surface coils and 3D GE sequences, imaging of the human skin in vivo with an isotropic resolution of (100 m) is feasible at reasonable scan times with normal conducting surface coils at 3 T. Small cutaneous and subcutaneous vessels are well delineated and SNR is sufficient for manual segmentation. At such high spatial resolutions, subject motion is one of the limiting factors for good image quality. Using rather short sequences (~10min) limits motion artifacts. SNR loss due to the short measurement time can be compensated for by averaging over multiple acquisitions after coregistration.