Jing Yuan1, Heather Ting Ma1,2,
Yi-Xiang Wang1, David K.W. Yeung1, James F. Griffith1
1Department of Diagnostic Radiology and
Organ Imaging, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories,
Hong Kong; 2Department of Electronic and Information Engineering,
Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate SchoolGradu, Shenzhen,
Guangdong, China
Arterial
spin labeling (ASL) is having many applications outside the brain. In the
abdomen, many problems arise with the traditional single shot EPI acquisition
for ASL such as distortion, low spatial resolution, susceptibility artifact,
Nyquist ghost, and chemical shift. A turbo field echo (TFE) acquisition with
STAR labeling (STAR-TFE) was developed to overcome these problems and applied
for abdominal ASL at 3T. Significant image quality improvement was achieved.
STAR-TFE has comparable temporal resolution with HASTE and b-ssfp
acquisition, but with lower SAR and no banding artifact. STAR-TFE should be
promising for abdominal perfusion in spinal bone marrow and kidney.