Yiu-Cho Chung1, Georgeta Mihai2, Orlando P. Simonetti2, Sanjay Rajagopalan2, Renate Jerecic3
1Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Columbus, OH, USA; 2OSU Ross Heart Hospital, Columbus, OH; 3Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Chicago, IL
Atherosclerosis is a systemic disease. Current 2D MRI approaches for plaque imaging interrogate sections of the vascular systems that may not be representative of the diseases systemic involvement. Also, 2D slices are less sensitive to plaque morphology changes in the slice direction, and slice gaps is difficult to account for in quantification. We propose a whole body 3D plaque imaging approach that covers vessels from neck to thigh. Volunteer studies showed that the approach can image a large vascular territory in an hour at isotropic voxel resolution between 0.8-1.2mm, demonstrating the approachs clinical feasibility in the evaluation of vascular diseases.