A major deficiency of MR angiography compared with CT angiography (CTA) has been its inability to detect and characterize peripheral vascular calcifications. Recently, MRI using a proton density-weighted, in-phase stack of stars technique proved capable of identifying these calcifications. However, the diamagnetic susceptibility and short T2* of calcifications have the potential to cause clinically relevant, field strength-dependent changes in lesion appearance with MRI. Since the impact of field strength on the appearance of vascular calcifications is unknown, we performed a two-center clinical study which demonstrated that MRI accurately depicts peripheral vascular calcifications at both 1.5 Tesla and 3.0 Tesla.
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