Vascular suppression is critical to facilitate confident identification and pathologic changes of small caliber peripheral nerves, many of great clinical importance, that run alongside slow-flowing veins. In our experience, non-contrast flow suppression techniques are suboptimal for complete venous suppression. Previous studies describe the efficacy of intravenous gadolinium for vascular suppression and visualization of the plexus proper using a three-dimensional STIR pulse, but its use for visualizing small plexus branch nerves has not been reported. This study demonstrated that post-STIR imaging significantly improved vascular suppression and visualization of branch nerves compared to non-contrast techniques, with high inter- and intra-rater agreement.
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