Whole Body Three Dimensional Plaque Imaging

Yiu-Cho Chung¹, Georgeta Mihai², Orlando P. Simonetti², Sanjay Rajagopalan², Renate Jerecic³

Atherosclerosis is a systemic disease. Current 2D MRI approaches for plaque imaging interrogate sections of the vascular systems that may not be representative of the diseases systemic involvement. Also, 2D slices are less sensitive to plaque morphology changes in the slice direction, and slice gaps is difficult to account for in quantification. We propose a whole body 3D plaque imaging approach that covers vessels from neck to thigh. Volunteer studies showed that the approach can image a large vascular territory in an hour at isotropic voxel resolution between 0.8-1.2mm, demonstrating the approachs clinical feasibility in the evaluation of vascular diseases.