Abstract #2785

Identification of Carotid Lipid-Rich Necrotic Core by Three-Dimensional Magnetization-Prepared Rapid Acquisition Gradient-Echo Imaging

Huiyu Qiao¹, Dongxiang Xu², Feiyu Li³, William S. Kerwin², Lars Johansson⁴, Chun Yuan^1,2, and Xihai Zhao¹

¹Center for Biomedical Imaging Research, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People's Republic of China, ²Department of Radiology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, ³Department of Radiology, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing, People's Republic of China, ⁴Department of Radiology, Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden

Carotid atherosclerotic lipid-rich necrotic core (LRNC) is associated with ischemic cerebrovascular events. Currently, LRNC was mainly characterized by contrast-enhanced T1 weighted (CE-T1W) or T2 weighted (T2W) imaging. However, CE-T1W imaging needs gadolinium application and T2W imaging is challenging to identify LRNCs with long-T2 components. This study investigated the usefulness of MP-RAGE in identifying carotid LRNC by comparing with CE-T1W and T2W imaging. We found that LRNC had the lowest relative signal intensity against muscle or fibrous tissue on MP-RAGE images among three sequences (P<0.05), indicating that MP-RAGE might be a better non-contrast imaging tool to identify LRNC than T2W imaging.

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