Blood Vessel Contrast Enhancement Using Phase Corrected Real Imaging in Flow-Sensitive Black Blood Imaging

Tokunori Kimura¹, Masato Ikedo¹

We have already proposed a black-blood MR angiography technique named flow-sensitive black-blood (FSBB) combining flow dephasing gradients with 3D-GRE sequence. In this study, we proposed a simple technique of improving blood to background contrast by adding signal phase contrast to signal amplitude and assessed on the volunteer brain using 1.5T MR imager. We demonstrated that the wraparound artifacts appeared on the vessels when the phase difference from the background was over pi/2 were eliminated, and thus the blood to background contrasts were increased. This correction was useful for slow-flow vessels particularly when the surrounding background signal was smaller such as CSF.