Henrik Pedersen1, Adam Espe Hansen1,
Sebastian Kozerke2, Henrik B.W. Larsson1
1Functional Imaging Unit (KFNA),
Glostrup Hospital, Glostrup, Denmark; 2Institute for Biomedical
Engineering, University and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Dynamic
contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI currently suffers from limited spatial coverage,
preventing whole-brain quantification of cerebral blood flow. This study
presents a new fast 3D imaging sequence for whole-brain DCE-MRI, which
achieves a spatial coverage of 20 slices per second. The new sequence
achieves faster imaging by skipping the saturation recovery (SR) pulses of
conventional DCE-MRI and undersampling k-space using k-t PCA and partial
Fourier imaging. The overall image quality of the proposed sequence is
similar to conventional DCE-MRI, but we conclude that reliable sampling of
the arterial input function requires a separate data acquisition, i.e., a
dual-bolus approach.