Abstract
Purpose: To evaluate accuracy and reproducibility of flow velocity and volume measurements in a phantom and in human coronary arteries using breathhold velocityencoded (VE) MRI with spiral k-space sampling at 3 Tesla. Materials and Methods: Flow velocity assessment was performed using VE MRI with spiral k-space sampling. Accuracy of VE MRI was tested in vitro at five constant flow rates. Reproducibility was investigated in 19 healthy subjects (mean age 25.4 ± 1.2 years, 11 men) by repeated acquisition in the right coronary artery (RCA). Results: MRI-measured flow rates correlated strongly with volumetric collection (Pearson correlation r = 0.99; P < 0.01). Due to limited sample resolution, VE MRI overestimated the flow rate by 47% on average when nonconstricted region-of-interest segmentation was used. Using constricted region-of-interest segmentation with lumen size equal to ground-truth luminal size, less than 13% error in flow rate was found. In vivo RCA flow velocity assessment was successful in 82% of the applied studies. High interscan, intra- and inter-observer agreement was found for almost all indices describing coronary flow velocity. Reproducibility for repeated acquisitions varied by less than 16% for peak velocity values and by less than 24% for flow volumes. Conclusion: 3T breathhold VE MRI with spiral k-space sampling enables accurate and reproducible assessment of RCA flow velocity.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1215-1223 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging |
Volume | 31 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 2010 |
Keywords
- Accuracy
- Coronary flow velocity
- MRI
- Reproducibility
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging