Scan Time Reduction for Three-Directional Phase Contrast Sequences: A Signal Processing Approach

Francesco Santini¹, Michael Markl², Klaus Scheffler¹

The traditional phase contrast reconstruction for three-directional flow encoding extracts a single velocity point from four acquisitions, yielding a final temporal resolution equal to four times the duration of a single encoding step. The temporal resolution can be increased by a sliding window reconstruction, but significant distortions of the frequency content of the signal can still be present. In this work, we present a postprocessing method based on inverse signal filtering that can partially compensate for the distortion, thus effectively increasing the available bandwidth by a factor of two with respect to the conventional reconstruction, and therefore enabling an analogous decrease of the total acquisition time.