Accelerating phase contrast MR angiography by simplified skipped phase encoding and edge deghosting with array coil enhancement.

PURPOSE

The aim of this work is to investigate the feasibility of accelerating phase contrast magnetic resonance angiography (PC-MRA) by the fast imaging method of simplified skipped phase encoding and edge deghosting with array coil enhancement (S-SPEED-ACE).

METHODS

The parallel imaging method of skipped phase encoding and edge deghosting with array coil enhancement (SPEED-ACE) is simplified for imaging sparse objects like phase contrast MRA. This approach is termed S-SPEED-ACE in which k-space is sparsely sampled with skipped phase encoding at every Nth step using multiple receiver coils simultaneously. The sampled data are then Fourier transformed into a set of ghosted images, each with N-fold aliasing ghosts. Given signal sparseness of MRA, the ghosted images are modeled with a single-layer structure, in which the most dominant ghost within the potentially overlapped ghosts at each pixel is selected to represent the signal of that pixel. The single-layer model is analogous to that used in maximum-intensity-projection (MIP) that selects only the brightest signal even when there are overlapped vessels. With an algorithm based on a least-square-error solution, a deghosted image is obtained, along with a residual map for quality control. In this way, S-SPEED-ACE partially samples k-space using multiple receiver coils in parallel, and yields a deghosted image with an acceleration factor of N. Without full central k-space sampling and differential filtering, S-SPEED-ACE achieves further scan time reduction with a more straightforward reconstruction. In this work, S-SPEED-ACE is demonstrated to accelerate a computer simulated PC-MRA and a real human 3D PC-MRA, which was acquired using a clinical 1.5 T scanner on a healthy volunteer.

RESULTS

Images are reconstructed by S-SPEED-ACE to achieve an undersampling factor of up to 8.3 with four receiver coils. The reconstructed images generally have comparable quality as that of the reference images reconstructed from full k-space data. Maximum-intensity-projection images generated from the reconstructed images also demonstrated to be consistent as those from the reference images.

CONCLUSIONS

By taking advantage of signal sparsity naturally existing in the data, SPEED-ACE was simplified and its efficiency was improved. The feasibility of the proposed S-SPEED-ACE is demonstrated in this work with simulated sampling of an actual 3D head PC-MRA scan.