Simultaneous Multi-VENC and Multi-Slice (SMVMS) Phase Contrast Imaging Using Dual Steady-State Sequence

Phase contrast (PC) MRI has been successfully applied to quantify flow velocity over the cardiac cycle by adding bipolar gradients with opposite polarity to cine gradient echo (GRE) sequences with prospective cardiac gating. However, PC-MRI suffers from a couple of disadvantages: 1) velocity aliasing which requires multiple acquisition without prior knowledge of the highest potential velocity and 2) excessive lengthy scan with whole brain coverage. In this work, we propose the Simultaneous Multi-VENC and Multi-Slice (SMVMS) technique to eliminate both issues. Instead of sequentially acquiring multiple slices with low and high velocity encoding (VENC) schemes, this interleaves an echo-shift technique in a Dual TR Steady-State (DSS) sequence using SMS excitation, which allows fast acquisition by sharing low- and high-VENC acquisitions with multiple slices in a single measurement.