Black Blood Vessel Wall Imaging of the Lower Extremities with T2prep Inversion Recovery: A Feasibility Study

Thanh D. Nguyen¹, Ryan Brown¹, Matthew D. Cham¹, Pascal Spincemaille¹, Priscilla A. Winchester¹, Grace Choi¹, Martin R. Prince¹, Yi Wang¹

Black blood techniques including double inversion recovery (DIR), spatial presaturation, and motion-sensitizing magnetization preparation perform well in elastic arteries with fast blood flow, but are less effective in the lower extremities where blood flow is substantially slower. The aim of this study is to optimize T2prep inversion recovery (T2IR) sequence, a novel flow-insensitive black blood technique, and to investigate the feasiblity of T2IR fast spin echo (FSE) for lower extremity vessel wall imaging with DIR-FSE as a reference. T2IR was found to provide improved robustness against slow flow artifacts at the cost of lower SNR. Vessel wall areas obtained with DIR-FSE and T2IR-FSE were comparable in both femoral (p=0.28) and popliteal (p=0.1) arteries.