Alexandru Vlad Avram1,2, Arnaud Guidon1,2,
Chunlei Liu2, Allen W. Song2
1Biomedical Engineering
Department, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States; 2Brain
Imaging & Analysis Center, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC,
United States
The emerging phase contrast and susceptibility imaging can be significantly influenced by the susceptibility within the blood pool. We present here a method to reduce and remove blood contributions to the tissue microstructural mapping. Specifically, a flow-compensated diffusion preparation pulse was introduced to eliminate the intravascular blood signal. The extra-vascular effect is intrinsically suppressed by voxel-averaging the dipolar field around the vessel. Given the usual long echo time required for sufficient phase contrast, the insertion of diffusion packet does not increase the overall imaging time. As a result, our method is effective in removing blood contributions in susceptibility contrast imaging.
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