High spatial and temporal resolution MRA (TWIST) in acute aortic dissection

Introduction: Endovascular treatment of descending thoracic and abdominal aortic dissection has emerged as an alternative to open surgery. In terms of endovascular aortic stent-graft placement planning, MRI appears to be particularly useful as it can provide a comprehensive preinterventional diagnostic evaluation of the vascular aortic morphology. However, standard MRA techniques provided no information on flow and tissue perfusion. Therefore, time-resolved MR-angiography (MRA) techniques have recently been introduced to overcome these limitations. Until now sufficient temporal resolution and coverage for the assessment of aortic dissection could only be achieved scarifying special resolution, thus requiring an additional high resolution MR angiography. Our study aimed to evaluate the image quality and the diagnostic accuracy of a recently developed time-resolved 3D MR angiography technique (TWIST) combining high spatial and temporal resolution for the pre-interventional assessment of aortic dissection.