Acceleration Techniques for Phase Contrast Flow Quantification: A Deal with the Devil?

Francesco Santini¹

Spatiotemporal acceleration techniques, while allowing high acceleration factors, increase the temporal footprint of each image, because every reconstructed frame contains information from neighboring images. In particular, higher framerates can give the illusion of better accuracy, while in fact leaving the actual information content unchanged. The purpose of this work is to recall the basic concepts of signal sampling and MRI acceleration applied to flow imaging, and to provide a general guideline to compare different acquisition/reconstruction methods in order to obtain the most efficient acquisition.