[Flow contrast behavior in fast MR angiography with an ECG-triggered, slice-selective inversion recovery turbo-FLASH technique].

Purpose: To optimise and evaluate fast "inflow"-based contrast-prepared gradient-echo magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) of blood vessels with pulsatile flow.

Material And Method: We used a standard 2-D Turbo-FLASH sequence with an acquisition time of 0.9 s and a slice-selective hyperbolic secant inversion (SSIR) pulse for contrast preparation. Trigger delay and inversion time were systematically varied.

Results: Abdominal blood vessels of volunteers showed high signal intensity compared to stationary tissue without pulsatile artifacts. However, depending on cardiac cycle and inversion time, venous vessels in particular exhibited a periodic signal drop by maximum 70% of the peak value. Using optimised parameters SSIR turbo-FLASH images of patients could be obtained with high flow contrast between normal and pathological structures.

Conclusion: With ECG triggering SSIR Turbo-FLASH MRA enables fast imaging of pulsatile vessels with optimised flow contrast.