Efficacy of slow infusion of gadolinium contrast agent in three-dimensional MR coronary artery imaging

✍ Scribed by Jie Zheng; Kyongtae T. Bae; Pamela K. Woodard; E. Mark Haacke; Debiao Li

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 256 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1053-1807
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1522-2586(199911)10:5<800::aid-jmri26>3.0.co;2-l

✦ Synopsis

The impact of the contrast infusion scheme on contrastenhanced coronary artery imaging was investigated. The imaging technique was a retrospective respiratory-gated gradient-echo sequence. To improve the contrast between blood vessels and myocardium, an inversion pulse was applied to null the myocardial signal. Extravascular contrast agent was infused slowly during data acquisition. Two contrast infusion schemes were compared in animal and volunteer studies and with simulations. One scheme enhanced blood signals during acquisition of both peripheral and central k-space data, which resulted in a relatively flat low-pass k-space filter. The other scheme mainly enhanced blood signals during acquisition of central k-space data, which resulted in a sharp low-pass k-space filter. It is concluded that the former scheme improves the signal-tonoise ratio and edge definition of coronary arteries compared with the latter scheme.