3D flow-insensitive vessel wall imaging using T2PREP PSIR with SSFP

Introduction Double Inversion Recovery (DIR) [1] and Flow Sensitive Dephasing (FSD) [2] have been used to suppress arterial signal in vessel wall imaging. However, the “black blood” effect of DIR and FSD depends on blood flow, which makes these techniques less effective with slow or in-plane flow. In this work, T1 and T2 differences between blood and vessel wall were exploited using a T2-prepared non-selective inversion preparation [3] for flow-insensitive vessel wall imaging. To alleviate the dependence of blood/vessel wall contrast on the choice of inversion recovery time (TI) and heart rate in ECG-triggered data acquisition, a Phase Sensitive Inversion Recovery (PSIR) [4] approach was used to achieve 3D flow-insensitive vessel wall imaging.