Sliding interleaved k(Y) (SLINKY) acquisition: A novel 3D MRA technique with suppressed slab boundary artifact

This work addresses the elimination of the slab boundary artifact (SBA) or venetian blind artifact in three-dimensional multiple overlapped thin slab acquisition (3D MOTSA) for magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), Our method uses a sliding-slab, interleaved k(Y) (SLINKY) data acquisition strategy, equalizing now-related signal intensity weighting across the entire slab di mension, This technique demodulates signal intensity changes along the slab direction and can essentially eliminate the SEA while retaining the same o r better imaging time efficiency than that of conventional MOTSA, providing robustness to complicated now patterns and thereby resulting in more accur ate depiction of vascular morphology, In addition, this technique does not need specialized reconstruction and extra computation. The unique penalty o f this technique is the sensitivity to phase inconsistency in the data, Bot h phantom and in vivo experiments verify the clinical significance of the t echnique. The new MRA images acquired with this imaging technique show high ly reliable mapping of vascular morphology without the SEA and reduction of signal voids in complex/slow now regions.