Comparison Between Two Types of Improved Motion-Sensitized Driven-Equilibrium (iMSDE) for Intracranial Black-Blood Imaging at 3.0 Tesla

Purpose: To investigate the image quality impact of a new implementation of the improved motion-sensitized driven-equilibrium (iMSDE) pulse scheme in the human brain at 3.0 Tesla. Materials and Methods: Two iMSDE preparation schemes were compared; (a) iMSDE-1: two refocusing pulses and two pairs of bipolar gradients and (b) iMSDE-2: adding extra bipolar gradients in front of the iMSDE-1 preparation. Computer simulation was used to evaluate the difference of eddy currents effect between these two approaches. Five healthy volunteers were then scanned with both sequences in the intracranial region and signal changes associated with iMSDE-1 and iMSDE-2 were assessed and compared quantitatively and qualitatively. Results: Simulation results demonstrated that eddy currents are better compensated in iMSDE-2 than in the iMSDE-1 design. In vivo comparison showed that the iMSDE-2 sequence significantly reduced the tissue signal loss at all locations compared with iMSDE-1 (5.0% versus 23% in average, P < 0.0002 at paired t-test). The signal in iMSDE-1 showed greater spatial inhomogeneity than that of iMSDE-2. Conclusion: Our results show that iMSDE-2 demonstrated smaller loss in signal and less spatial variation compared with iMSDE-1, we conjecture due to the improved eddy current compensation.