Tzu-Cheng Chao1, 2, Ming-Ting Wu3, Maria Alejandra Durn Mendicuti4, Bruno Madore4
1Institute of Medical Informatics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan; 2Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Naional Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan; 3Department of Radiology, Kaohsiung Veteran General Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; 4Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
Routinely-used pulmonary angiography methods, such as CTA and CE-MRA, require the administration of an intravenous contrast agent. These protocols are not generally suitable for subjectswith low renal function. A modified 3D slab-interleaved sequence is proposed here for non-contrast enhanced 3D pulmonary MRA. A retrospective ECG gated reconstruction with hybrid parallel imaging technique is introduced to accelerate the acquisition and to time-resolve the entire cardiac cycle. In addition to conventional vessel images, the proposed strategy can differentiate veins from arteries based on vessel pulsatility, to further facilitate the image interpretation.