High-Resolution, High-SNR Velocity Maps Reconstructed from Low-Resolution Fourier Velocity Encoded MRI Data

Vinicius de Carvalho Rispoli¹, ², Joao L. A. Carvalho¹

Fourier velocity encoding (FVE) provides considerably higher SNR than phase contrast, and is robust to partial-volume effects. FVE typically presents low spatial resolution, due to scan-time restrictions associated with its higher dimensionality. FVE is capable of providing the velocity distribution associated with a large voxel, but does not directly provides a velocity map. We propose a method for deriving high spatial resolution velocity maps from low-resolution FVE data. Experiments using numerical phantoms, as well as simulated spiral FVE data derived from real phase contrast data, show that it is possible to obtain reasonably accurate velocities maps from low-resolution FVE distributions.