Comparison of advanced MR reconstruction methods on Non-Contrast-Enhanced-MR AAngiography

The concept of MRA summarizes many different techniques that enable the in-vivo depiction of the human vessels without the use of ionizing radiation. Dependent on the delivery of a contrast agent it can further be divided into CE-MRA and NCE-MRA. The major advantage of NCE-MRA is that there is no need for an invasive application of the intra-arterial contrast agent, with the drawback of prolonged acquisition times.
The goal of this work is to evaluate the applicability of advanced MR image reconstruction methods that allow for accelerated data acquisition. A total of four reconstruction methods combined with two undersampling schemes were tested and the specific limitations were described.
To this end selected NCE-MRA techniques for different anatomical regions were adjusted on a 3T MR system to acquire reference data on which retrospective simulation of acceleration was performed.
This work compares two methods of undersampling with four image reconstruction methods on the data of the four different selected NCE-MRA techniques and shows the limitations of the imaging methods and the advanced image reconstruction techniques.