Yutaka
Natsuaki1, Randall Kroeker2, Gerhard Laub3
1Siemens Medical Solutions, Los
Angeles, CA, United States; 2Siemens Medical Solutions, Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada; 3Siemens Medical Solutions, San Francisco, CA,
United States
One
of the major drawbacks with 3DTOF is the inplane flow saturation, where the
fresh inflow enters the imaging volume and gets saturated by the imaging RF
pulses. This is particularly
problematic when the inflow vessels are perpendicular to the slice direction
(e.g. vertebral arteries), and this may result in signal loss of the blood
vessels. The current work proposes a
novel approach to the magnetization prepared 3D TOF MRA with the partial
saturation recovery (SR) 3D-FLASH. The
optimization strategies and initial results with improved visualization of
vertebral arteries are presented.