Imaging of the central thoracic veins is often challenging due to renal failure and/or difficult venous access, which render contrast agent administration problematic. This work assesses a non-contrast-enhanced free-breathing 3D subtractive MR angiography method for thoracic central vein imaging in a group of 18 patients. Evaluation by experienced radiologists demonstrated that angiograms obtained with this new method give high diagnostic confidence, which is significantly better than our standard 2D breath-hold approach in the absence of contrast medium. There is also better agreement between readers for the new sequence.
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