Intrinsic signal amplification in the application of 2D SENSE parallel imaging to 3D contrast-enhanced elliptical centric MRA and MRV.

The relative signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) provided by 2D sensitivity encoding (SENSE) when applied to 3D contrast-enhanced MR angiography (CE-MRA) is studied. If an elliptical centric phase-encoding order is used to map the waning magnetization of the contrast bolus to k-space, the application of SENSE will reduce the degree of k-space signal modulation, providing a signal amplification A over corresponding nonaccelerated acquisitions. This offsets the SNR loss in R-accelerated SENSE due to suquare root R and the geometry (g) factor. The theoretical bound on A is R and is reduced from this depending on the properties of the bolus profile and the duration over which it is imaged. In this work a signal amplification of 1.14-1.23 times that of nonvascular background tissue is demonstrated in a study of 20 volunteers using R = 4 2D SENSE whole-brain MR venography (MRV). The effects of a nonuniform g-factor and inhomogeneity of background tissue are accounted for. The observed amplification compares favorably with the value of 1.31 predicted numerically from a measured bolus curve.