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Abstract #3785

A Novel 3D Time-Of-Flight MRA with Optimized Partial Saturation Recovery 3D-FLASH

Yutaka Natsuaki1, Randall Kroeker2, Gerhard Laub3

1Siemens Medical Solutions, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 2Siemens Medical Solutions, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; 3Siemens Medical Solutions, San Francisco, CA, United States


One of the major drawbacks with 3DTOF is the inplane flow saturation, where the fresh inflow enters the imaging volume and gets saturated by the imaging RF pulses. This is particularly problematic when the inflow vessels are perpendicular to the slice direction (e.g. vertebral arteries), and this may result in signal loss of the blood vessels. The current work proposes a novel approach to the magnetization prepared 3D TOF MRA with the partial saturation recovery (SR) 3D-FLASH. The optimization strategies and initial results with improved visualization of vertebral arteries are presented.