Hua Guo1, Iliyana Atanasova1,2,
Ruth P. Lim1, Pippa Storey1, Jian Xu3, Qun
Chen1, Henry Rusinek1, Zhaoyang Fan4, Debiao
Li4, Vivian S. Lee1
1Department of Radiology, New York
University School of Medicine, New York, NY, United States; 2Columbia
University, New York, NY, United States; 3Siemens Medical
Solutions USA, Inc., MR R&D Collaboration, New York, United States; 4Departments
of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Chicago,
IL, United States
Flow-sensitive
dephasing prepared balanced steady state free precession (FSD-bSSFP) has been
proposed as a non-contrast MRA technique for the lower extremities at 1.5T.
However, its application at higher magnetic fields is hindered by poor B0 and
B1 homogeneities. As a result, the background signal cannot be completely
suppressed. In this work, we investigated the performance of B1-insensitive
adiabatic RF pulses for FSD preparation to improve non-contrast MRA with
FSD-bSSFP at 3T. The results demonstrate that the approach is less
B1-sensitive than with conventional hard RF pulses, thus providing better
background signal suppression and more reliable MRA images at 3T.