Effect of Trajectory Delay in Cine Ultra-Short TE Phase-Contrast MR Imaging of the Carotid Bifurcation

Mo Kadbi¹, Hui Wang¹, Lizette Warner², Melanie Traughber², Motaz Alshaher¹, Andrea Yancey³, Jens Heidenreich¹, Amir A. Amini¹

UTE phase contrast may be a more accurate technique for measurment of blood flow with higher Reynolds numbers. Additional potential application areas for UTE PC MRI is measurement of blood flow in the presence of atherosclerotic disease where there is turbulent and disturbed flow distal to a stenosis. UTE can remedy intravoxel dephasing which leads to signal loss and reduce errors in velocity measurment . These delays can result in phase errors that may affect the accuracy and reliability of flow measurements. In this work we present a UTE-PC sequence to measure the disturbed blood flows and show that correction of these phase errors improves the result of UTE-PC technique dramatically. Here, the proposed sequence is utilized to quantitatively measure blood velocity in the carotid bifurcation which is associated with disturbed blood flow and results are compared to standard PC MRI sequences.