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Artifacts and Limitations

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Magnetic Resonance Angiography

Part of the book series: Medical Radiology ((Med Radiol Diagn Imaging))

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Abstract

Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) has emerged as a noninvasive technique for evaluating patients with different vascular diseases. However, with the standard two-dimensional (2D) time-of-flight (TOF) technique there are many difficulties in detecting stenoses and occlusions in diseased arteries because of a variety of flow-related artifacts (Brunereau et al. 1998). Therefore, alternative strategies have been studied to improve MRA (Atkinson et al. 1997), including cardiac gating, segmented fast gradient-echo MRA, and the phase-contrast (PC) technique with variable velocity encoding. A few years ago, three-dimensional (3D) contrast-enhanced (CE) MRA was introduced as a method for vascular imaging with short acquisition times. A thorough understanding of the underlying mechanisms, proper techniques, and artifacts is essential to fully exploit the diagnostics potentials of these methods and to avoid misinterpretations (Stringer 1997; Tsuruda et al. 1992). This chapter presents some of the artifacts, limitations, and pitfalls that may be encountered with MRA.

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Vosshenrich, R., Reimer, P. (2002). Artifacts and Limitations. In: Arlart, I.P., Bongartz, G.M., Marchal, G. (eds) Magnetic Resonance Angiography. Medical Radiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56247-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56247-1_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43975-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-56247-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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