OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of a highly accelerated breath-hold 3-dimensional noncontrast-enhanced steady-state free precession thoracic magnetic resonance angiography (NC-MRA) technique in a clinical population, including assessment of image quality, aortic dimensions, and aortic pathology, compared with electrocardiographically gated gadolinium-enhan...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Dual-source CTA and black-blood MRA are recently developed techniques for evaluating carotid stenosis. The purpose of this study was to compare dual-source CTA with black-blood MRA and conventional TOF MRA in both detecting carotid stenosis by using DSA as a reference standard and demonstrating plaque morphology. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty patients with suspected caro...

Introduction Using first-pass MRA (FP-MRA) spatial resolution is limited by breath-hold duration, and image quality (IQ) may be hampered by motion artefacts. Studies at 1.5 T have shown that the use of blood-pool contrast agents (BP-CA) allows for motion-compensated high-resolution MRA during the steady-state, yielding significantly higher IQ compared to FP-MRA. However, MRA with BP-CAs does no...

BACKGROUND Traditional digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is currently the gold standard diagnostic method for the diagnosis and evaluation of cerebral arteriovenous malformation (AVM) and dural arteriovenous fistulas (dAVF). OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to analyze different less invasive magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) images, time-resolved MRA (TR-MRA) and three-dimensional ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Our aim was to compare contrast-enhanced MR angiography (CE-MRA) and 3D time-of-flight (TOF) MRA at 3T for follow-up of coiled cerebral aneurysms. MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifty-two patients treated with Guglielmi detachable coils for 54 cerebral aneurysms were evaluated at 3T MRA. 3D TOF MRA (TR/TE = 23/3.5; SENSE factor = 2.5) and CE-MRA by using a 3D ultrafast gradient-...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Blood flow in an intracranial stent cannot be visualized with 3D time-of-flight MR angiography owing to magnetic susceptibility and radiofrequency shielding. As a novel follow-up tool after stent-assisted coil embolization, we applied MRA by using a Silent Scan algorithm that contains an ultrashort TE combined with an arterial spin-labeling technique (Silent MRA). The pur...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The multimodal magnetic resonance imaging study in acute stroke includes perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI) after administration of contrast and magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). However, MRA may overestimate the degree of vessel obstruction caused by limitations to detect low flow states. Our aim was to determine the usefulness of a new fast imaging protocol combining ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Endovascularly coiled intracranial aneurysms are increasingly being followed up with noninvasive MRA imaging to evaluate for aneurysm recurrences. It has not been well-established which MRA techniques are best for this application, however. Our aim was to prospectively compare 4 MRA techniques, TOF and CE-MRA at 1.5T and 3T, to a reference standard of DSA in the evaluatio...

Modified Reconstructibility Analysis (MRA), a novel decomposition within the framework of set-theoretic (crisp possibilistic) reconstructibility analysis, is presented. It is shown that in some cases, while three-variable NPNclassified Boolean functions are not decomposable using Conventional Reconstructibility Analysis (CRA), they are decomposable using MRA. Also, it is shown that whenever a d...