A Novel Slice-Selective Implementation of the Adiabatic T2Prep Sequence Objectively Improves Coronary Artery Conspicuity

Sahar Soleimanifard¹, Michael Schr¹, ², Allison G. Hays¹, Jerry L. Prince¹, Robert G. Weiss¹, Matthias Stuber¹, ³

In non-contrast coronary MRA, the T₂Prep sequence has been widely used for contrast enhancement between the coronary blood-pool and the myocardium. This non-selective sequence, however, results in a reduced steady-state magnetization of the inflowing blood, and consequently a penalty in SNR. We hypothesize that a slice-selective variant of this pre-pulse would leave the magnetization of blood outside the imaged volume unaffected, and thereby minimize SNR penalty for inflowing blood. In this work, we implemented a slice-selective T₂Prep and assessed the SNR gain and vessel conspicuity quantitatively using an automatic framework for vessel centerline tracking and boundary segmentation.