Echo-planar magnetic resonance angiography.
Practical ultrafast, especially echo-planar, imaging is still in its infancy. All the more so for ultrafast angiography. Nevertheless, a few practical forays into this imaging application have shown promise. Compared to conventional MR angiography, the use of EP imaging can offer net advantages in reduced sensitivity both to motion artifacts from gross patient motion and to signal losses from changing blood flow velocities. Little work has been done to date on obvious application of ultrafast MR angiography (e.g., interleaved phase-contrast methods). The few existing reports on this topic suggest that EP imaging may be useful for much more exotic applications such as the imaging and velocity quantitation of the major coronary arteries. EP imaging will most likely have its greatest impact on MR angiography in these more exotic areas, tackling imaging problems in the moving structures most difficult to study.
Cohen
M S
MS
Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, USA.
D017352:Echo-Planar Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D018810:Magnetic Resonance Angiography / Q000379:methods*