Multi-Slice Breathhold Phase-Sensitive Coronary Vessel Wall Imaging at 3T

Introduction Black-blood coronary vessel wall imaging is a powerful non-invasive tool for the quantitative assessment of positive arterial remodeling. Although dual-inversionrecovery (DIR) is the current standard for non-invasive coronary vessel wall imaging, optimal lumen-vessel wall contrast is sometimes difficult to obtain and the time-window available for imaging is limited due to the competing requirements between TI (blood signal nulling time), TD (period of minimal myocardial motion), and heart rate. In addition, atherosclerosis is a spatially heterogeneous disease and therefore imaging at multiple anatomical levels of the coronary circulation is mandatory. However, both enhanced volumetric coverage and blood-tissue contrast typically come at the expense of increased scanning time. Phase-sensitive IR (PSIR) has shown to be a valuable tool for enhancing tissue-tissue contrast and for making IR imaging less sensitive to TI. This work extends PS-IR to PS-DIR, and combined with spiral-imaging, multi-slice black-blood coronary vessel wall imaging is enabled in a single breath-hold. Methods Theory: After a DIR pre-pulse (Fig.1), the inversion time TI T ln 0.5 1