Compressed Sensing with Vascular Phase Contrast Acquisition

Kevin F. King¹, Wei Sun²

Vascular phase contrast imaging has recently become more popular due to the emergence of nephrogenic systemic fibrosis. Several echoes with different flow moments are processed to give flow velocity weighted images. Since the images are sparse, compressed sensing can be combined with parallel imaging to accelerate phase contrast acquisition with better results than if parallel imaging were used alone. Most of the benefit is obtained by applying compressed sensing to each echo separately. A small additional improvement results from using a sparsifying transform of the final flow image as well. This produces a jointly optimized solution for all echoes.