Efficient Substitute for Inversion Preparation in TSE Angiography

Jason K. Mendes¹, Dennis L. Parker¹

Turbo spin echo (TSE or FSE) is an important technique in the discrimination of atherosclerotic plaque components such as hemorrhage, disrupted fibrous cap, lipid/necrotic core, calcification and ulceration. To distinguish between stationary tissue and flowing blood, several techniques such as Double Inversion Recovery (DIR), Quadruple Inversion Recovery (QIR) or Motion-Sensitized Driven-Equilibrium (MDSE) have been proposed These suppression techniques involve various combinations of inversion pulses over a large volume outside the slice(s) of interest. This prevents efficient interleaving of multiple slices and results in a dramatic increase in total scan time. This work utilizes a novel dynamic TSE sequence (cineTSE) to provide analogous information to blood suppression techniques with no increase in scan time over a typical (non-inversion prepared) TSE protocol.