Abstract #2148

Stork A, Kaul M, Bansmann P, Adam G, Priest A

Coronary vessel-wall imaging can be used to detect atherosclerosis and could thus have important clinical applications. To improve the SNR of this technique, we have implemented 3D coronary vessel-wall imaging at 3 Tesla. A particular problem of this method is that, for black-blood preparation, a local re-inversion pulse must be used to avoid inflow of left ventricular blood, but at 3T the previously used cylindrical prepulse is less robust, and flip angle inhomogeneities reduce the effectiveness of re-inversion. We therefore use an obliquely oriented re-inversion slab, implemented using adiabatic pulses, and have demonstrated the feasibility of this method in vivo.