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Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine (2018) 31:457–467
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334-017-0667-3
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Accelerated whole brain intracranial vessel wall imaging using black
blood fast spin echo with compressed sensing (CS‑SPACE)
Chengcheng Zhu
1
· Bing Tian
2
· Luguang Chen
2
· Laura Eisenmenger
1
· Esther Raithel
3
· Christoph Forman
3
·
Sinyeob Ahn
4
· Gerhard Laub
4
· Qi Liu
2
· Jianping Lu
2
· Jing Liu
1
· Christopher Hess
1
· David Saloner
1
Received: 28 June 2017 / Revised: 16 November 2017 / Accepted: 22 November 2017 / Published online: 5 December 2017
© ESMRMB 2017
Abstract
Objective Develop and optimize an accelerated, high-resolution (0.5 mm isotropic) 3D black blood MRI technique to reduce
scan time for whole-brain intracranial vessel wall imaging.
Materials and methods A 3D accelerated T
1
-weighted fast-spin-echo prototype sequence using compressed sensing (CS-
SPACE) was developed at 3T. Both the acquisition [echo train length (ETL), under-sampling factor] and reconstruction
parameters (regularization parameter, number of iterations) were first optimized in 5 healthy volunteers. Ten patients with
a variety of intracranial vascular disease presentations (aneurysm, atherosclerosis, dissection, vasculitis) were imaged with
SPACE and optimized CS-SPACE, pre and post Gd contrast. Lumen/wall area, wall-to-lumen contrast ratio (CR), enhance-
ment ratio (ER), sharpness, and qualitative scores (1–4) by two radiologists were recorded.
Results The optimized CS-SPACE protocol has ETL 60, 20% k-space under-sampling, 0.002 regularization factor with 20
iterations. In patient studies, CS-SPACE and conventional SPACE had comparable image scores both pre- (3.35 ± 0.85 vs.
3.54 ± 0.65, p = 0.13) and post-contrast (3.72 ± 0.58 vs. 3.53 ± 0.57, p = 0.15), but the CS-SPACE acquisition was 37%
faster (6:48 vs. 10:50). CS-SPACE agreed with SPACE for lumen/wall area, ER measurements and sharpness, but margin-
ally reduced the CR.
Conclusion In the evaluation of intracranial vascular disease, CS-SPACE provides a substantial reduction in scan time
compared to conventional T
1
-weighted SPACE while maintaining good image quality.
Keywords 3D black blood SPACE · Intracranial vessel wall MRI · Compressed sensing · Aneurysm · Atherosclerosis
Introduction
Intracranial vascular diseases, including atherosclerotic
plaques and aneurysms, are major causes of ischemic or
hemorrhagic strokes [1, 2]. The clinical management cri-
teria for these diseases depends on imaging of the lumen,
while the source of the disorder—the vessel wall—has rarely
been considered. Recent capabilities of high resolution black
blood MRI (hrMRI) have enabled the visualization of the
intracranial vessel wall characteristics [3]. Several recent
studies have demonstrated the ability of hrMRI to differenti-
ate between different types of intracranial vascular disease
[4], identify vulnerable atherosclerotic plaques [5–7] and
recognize ruptured and unstable aneurysms [8].
Previously, imaging of the intracranial vessel wall was
performed using 2D turbo-spin-echo hrMRI techniques
[6, 8, 9]. Recently, variable flip-angle 3D fast-spin-echo
sequences (such as Sampling Perfection with Application
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this
article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10334-017-0667-3) contains
supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Chengcheng Zhu
Chengcheng.Zhu@ucsf.edu
* Jianping Lu
cjr.lujianping@vip.163.com
1
Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging,
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),
San Francisco, CA, USA
2
Department of Radiology, Changhai Hospital, Shanghai,
China
3
Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany
4
Siemens Healthcare, San Francisco, CA, USA
@Phil_Robichaud
@deepthiw
@JoseServera