Occlusion of lenticulostriate arteries (LSAs) often leads to lacunar infarction. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) has high spatial resolution and superior definition of small vessels, and is the most widely used clinical routine to image LSAs. One drawback of DSA, however, is its invasiveness. Time-of-flight (TOF) magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) was recently shown to be able to image LSAs at ultra-high fields (i.e., 7 T) with specially-designed receiving coils. However, image LSAs with TOF-MRA on clinical MRI systems can be difficult due to the facts that blood flow in LSAs is slow and the luminal diameters in these vessels are small (i.e., 0.3~0.7 mm) relative to the dimension of imaging voxels. In this study, the flow-sensitive black-blood (FSBB) technique was optimized to image LSAs at 3 T to achieve a proper balance among spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio and scan time.
LI Lyu
,
ZHOU Ze-chen
,
GUO Hua
,
YUAN Chun
. Imaging Lenticulostriate Arteries at 3 Tesla Using Optimized Flow-Sensitive Black-Blood Technique[J]. Chinese Journal of Magnetic Resonance, 2016
, 33(4)
: 528
-538
.
DOI: 10.11938/cjmr20160402
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