[Usefulness of the sagittal section imaging technique in whole-heart coronary MRA(WHCA)].

Whole-heart coronary MRA(WHCA)was performed in transaxial and sagittal sections in random order in 10 healthy volunteers to obtain coronal section multiplanar reconstruction(MPR)at an interval of 0.5 mm and thickness of 1 mm for evaluation. Visual evaluation showed sagittal section imaging to be superior to transaxial section imaging in 12 out of a total of 20 regions in the left and right proximal coronary arteries. Sagittal section imaging was found to be superior to transaxial section imaging in evaluation of the hepatic left lobe in all the cases as well as in evaluation of the right peripheral coronary arteries in 8 of 9 cases that could be evaluated. For quantitative evaluation, the difference in brightness between the peripheral adipose tissues(S fat)and the coronary arteries(S coronary)was assigned as CR(S coronary/S fat). Highly comparable results were obtained by quantitative and visual evaluation. Phantom experimentation was performed. The piston of the syringe was substituted for the diaphragm. Ghost artifact caused by movement of the diaphragm and phase return, i.e., the slice phase-encoding direction of the 3D sequence, were the origin of poor images in transaxial section imaging. We thus conclude that sagittal section imaging is useful in WHCA as a 3D sequence.