Comparison of Image Acquisition Techniques in Four-Dimensional Flow Cardiovascular MR on 3 Tesla in Volunteers and Tetralogy of Fallot Patients.

Four-dimensional phase-contrast (PC) velocity-encoded flow magnetic resonance imaging (4D flow MRI) is a potentially valuable tool for studying cardiovascular hemodynamics for disease monitoring and/or treatment planning. In this study we compared the performance of two 4D flow MRI pulse sequences - echo-planar imaging (EPI) and segmented gradient-echo (turbo-field-echo or TFE on vendor's platform) - on a clinical 3T system in 6 human subjects including 3 patients with Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF). For aortic flow rate, the coefficients of variation (COV) between 2D and 4D EPI were 7.