Atherosclerosis, a systemic disease affecting large and medium sized arterial vessel walls is a leading cause of mortality in the world. MRI is quickly becoming the imaging modality of choice for visualizing atherosclerosis in the vessel wall. Atherosclerosis is evaluated in vivo by multi-contrast dark blood turbo spin echo imaging to evaluate plaque burden and composition. DCE- MRI can be used to evaluate plaque permeability. Recently, quantitative MR imaging in the form of T1 and T2 mapping of the vessel wall and on evaluating 4D flow, shear stress and circumferential strain in the arterial tree have become popular.
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Figure 1: Pathogenesis of Atherosclerosis.
Skeoch, S. & Bruce, I. N. Nat. Rev. Rheumatol. 2015. doi:10.1038/nrrheum.2015.40
Figure 2: Sample magnetic resonance images obtained from the three vascular beds using both three-dimensional SPACE and two-dimensional turbo spin echo sequences.
Wong et al. World J Radiol. 2014 May 28; 6(5): 192–202.
Figure 3: Sequence diagram of 3D-MERGE, T2-weighted VISTA and SNAP. (a - c) corresponds respectively to the pulse sequence diagram of 3D-MERGE, T2-weighted VISTA and SNAP. The fat saturation scheme used both for 3D-MERGE and T2-weighted VISTA is spectral presaturation inversion recovery (SPIR) and for SNAP is water selective excitation in practice but they are not shown in this schematic figure
Zhou et al. JCMR 2015 17:41DOI: 10.1186/s12968-015-0143-z
Figure 4: Carotid artery 3D black-blood T1 and T2 mapping sequence. Pulse sequence diagram for carotid artery 3D black-blood T1 and T2 mapping. Blood suppression, as well as T2-weighting, is achieved by an iMSDE prepulse. Subsequently, acquisition is performed using a segmented TFE read-out. T1 can be estimated from scans with different flip angle α, while T2 is estimated from scans with different TEprep (see also Table 1). To ensure correct T1 and T2 quantification, after each TFE shot, steady-state conditions are restored by a series of dummy pulses.
Coolen, B. F., et al Mag Res Med 2016, 75: 1008–1017. doi:10.1002/mrm.25634