MRI phase contrast velocity imaging is a widely disseminated on nearly all MRI scanners used for clinical diagnosis of brain disease, cardiac and cardiovascular disease and for neuroscience research. Currently phase contrast imaging of blood flow and CSF motion requires longer scan times with each 2D slice or 3D spatial image requiring additional dimension of velocity encoding requiring greater acquisition time. Given the physiological variation in heart rate, cardiac stroke output and respiratory motion effects on blood and CSF velocity, no less the need to greatly reduce the patients time in the scanner, there is a need to reduce the scan time of phase contrast imaging. To achieve several times faster imaging we propose to develop novel technology to acquire velocity phase images simultaneously instead of seperately. Our new technique called simultaneous multi-slice imaging (SMS) phase contrast (PC) imaging is innovated to obtain 2 -10 phase contrast images recorded simultaneously resulting in nearly this factor of reciprocal reduction in scan time. The availability of the new simultaneous phase contrast imaging technology will give clinicians and researchers the capability of performing significantly improved MRI perfusion measurements in the and these improvements will impact the diagnosis of many different diseases, including stroke, cardiac, cardiovascular diseases. Additionally blood flow and CSF flows which are important quantitative biomarkers useful as physiological imaging in evaluating new drug therapies for diseases. This family of new phase contrast imaging techniques utilizes more efficient pulse sequences that provide major advantages in resolution, slice coverage, SNR and speed. The new simultaneous imaging will have high utility and be highly desirable for use on clinical scanners worldwide. The improved quantitative MRI blood flow imaging offers overall increased speed that is highly commercializable given they provide improved diagnostic approaches to evaluate diseases and further improve specificity and sensitivity in MRI exams. The new technology will be designed, implemented and evaluated on MRI scanners at University of California Berkeley, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, and Cedar-Sinai Medical Center. Once imaging protocols are optimized they will be further evaluated and optimized in collaborative clinical test sites in Europe, including the major cardiovascular hospital in London, the Royal Brompton Hospital and elsewhere. In addition to establishing their value in medical exams, the simultaneous phase contrast imaging will be made into useful tools for basic and clinical research.
Phase contrast (PC) imaging is the most used MRI technique to measure blood flow and cerebrospinal fluid flow non-invasively for medical purposes. It is commercially available on nearly all manufactured scanners and is the gold standard technique of flow imaging by MRI. Its widespread use, however, is hampered by requiring several minutes of scanning time to obtain a single data set for velocity imaging. We propose to develop a highly accelerated technique to obtain several PC images at different slice levels simultaneously rather than a single image slice and to achieve several times faster imaging. The simultaneous quantitative imaging of blood flow and CSF flow will be highly valuable for medical diagnosis of cardiovascular and neurovascular diseases including stroke and be used as a general technique for a wide spectrum of diagnoses in the human body and for medical research.
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