Contrast Enhancement in TOF Cerebral Angiography At 7 Tesla Under SAR Constraints: Trading Between Saturation, VERSE & Magnetization Transfer RF Pulses

Sebastian Schmitter¹, Edward J. Auerbach¹, Gregor Adriany¹, Kamil Ugurbil¹, Pierre-Francois Van de Moortele¹

It has been shown that time-of-flight (TOF) cerebral angiography can be obtained at 7T. However, because of SAR limitations additional techniques like standard Saturation pulses (SAT) to target veins, and Magnetization Transfer (MT) to target background tissues cannot be applied. The goal of this work is to demonstrate 7T-TOF contrast enhancement using MT and/or SAT without exceeding SAR limitations. For this purpose, VERSE was applied on excitation and SAT pulses, MT was only applied during a subset of k-space lines. Our results indicate that VERSE SAT and sparse MT pulses successfully increase TOF contrast at 7T without exceeding SAR limits.