Objectives
Fresh blood imaging (FBI) is a useful non-contrast magnetic resonance angiography (NC-MRA) method for assessment of peripheral arterial disease (PAD), particularly in patients with poor renal function. Compared with 1.5T, 3T enables higher signal to noise ratio (SNR) and/or spatio-temporal resolution in FBI, as demonstrated successfully for the calf station. However, FBI of the thigh station at 3T has been reported to suffer from signal void in the common femoral artery of one thigh only due to the radial symmetry in transmit radio-frequency field (B1+) variation. We sought to increase the femoral arterial signal attenuated by B1+ variation in FBI at 3T using high permittivity dielectric padding.
Materials and Methods
We performed FBI of the thigh station in 13 human subjects at 3T to compare the following 3 settings: no padding, commercially available thick (~ 5 cm) dielectric padding, and high-permittivity thin (~2 cm) dielectric padding. B1+ mapping was also performed in the common femoral arteries to characterize the radial symmetry in B1+ variation and quantify the improvement in B1+ excitation. We characterized the impact of radial symmetry in B1+ variation on the FBI signal and FBI MRA of the right common femoral artery using quantitative (i.e., contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR)) and qualitative (i.e., conspicuity) analyses.
Results
The radial symmetry in B1+ variation attenuates signal in the right common femoral artery, which can be partially improved with commercial padding and improved further with high permittivity padding. Averaging the results over 13 subjects, the B1+, CNR and conspicuity scores in the right common femoral artery were significantly better with high-permittivity padding than with commercial padding and baseline (p<0.001).
Conclusions
Our study shows that high-permittivity dielectric padding can be used to increase the femoral arterial signal attenuated by B1+ variation in FBI at 3T.
This study shows that the proposed NC-MRA produces clinically acceptable image quality in patients at high spatial resolution (1.5 mm × 1.5 mm × 1.5 mm) and clinically acceptable scan time (~6 min).
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