This article is part of the supplement: Abstracts of the 12th Annual SCMR Scientific Sessions – 2009 .

Oral presentation

Phase-sensitive black-blood coronary vessel wall imaging

Khaled Z Abd-Elmoniem and Matthias Stuber

Department of Radiology, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

corresponding author email

from 12^th Annual SCMR Scientific Sessions
Orlando, FL, USA. 29 January–1 February 2009

Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance 2009, 11(Suppl 1):O11doi:10.1186/1532-429X-11-S1-O11

Published:	28 January 2009

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Black-blood coronary vessel wall imaging is a powerful non-invasive tool for the quantitative assessment of positive arterial remodeling [1]. Although dual-inversion-recovery [2] (DIR) is the gold standard for 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) and TD (period of minimal myocardial motion). In addition, atherosclerosis is a spatially heterogeneous disease and therefore imaging at multiple anatomical levels of the coronary circulation is mandatory. However, this requirement of enhanced volumetric coverage typically comes at the expense of increased scanning time. Phase-sensitive IR [3-5] (PS-IR) has shown to be valuable 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.