Holden H. Wu1, 2, Joelle K. Barral3, Dwight G. Nishimura2, Michael V. McConnell1, 2
1Cardiovascular Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 2Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; 3HeartVista, Inc., Los Altos, CA, United States
Black-blood imaging is a crucial technique for visualizing the myocardium and studying the progression of atherosclerosis in the vessel wall. In this work, we present a new double inversion-recovery (DIR) black-blood imaging method based on the non-Cartesian 2D concentric rings trajectory, which requires half the number of readouts compared to 2D Cartesian encoding and supports 2D centric ordering to maximize the effectiveness of the DIR preparation. In addition, the concentric rings are acquired with a time-efficient multi-revolution design to enable fat/water separation for enhanced image contrast. Experimental results from cardiac and carotid imaging demonstrate the performance of this proposed technique.