Visualization of Renal Artery and Its Branches of the Middle-Aged Healthy Adults: The Initial Study of Non-Contrast-Enhanced MR Angiography Using a Time-Spatial Labeling Inversion Pulse

Mengyu Liu¹, Huadan Xue², Xuan Wang², Yuan Liu², Zhengyu Jin²

26 middle-aged healthy volunteers were enrolled in this study to receive three-dimensional (3D) non-contrast enhanced MR angiography with a time-spatial labeling inversion pulse (Time-SLIP) of renal artery. All volunteers received coronal orientations with 3 different black blood inversion time(900, 1200, 1500 ms). Relative signal intensity (rSI) of renal artery, visibility score (Rank 1-4) in 3 segments of the renal artery and the numbers of the branches were evaluated as indexes of the Time-SLIP sequence image quality. We get the conclusion that a black blood inversion time of 1200ms was considered to be the optimal choice for this purpose.