Assessment of coronary artery disease wall thickening using phase-sensitive black-blood MRI: initial experience for the evaluation of coronary artery disease

Background Coronary arterial wall imaging is a promising non-invasive tool for quantitative assessment of arterial remodeling. Conventional techniques mandate imaging during cardiac rest period as well as nulling the blood signal inside the arterial lumen in order to generate an appropriate lumen-wall contrast. These constraints limited the use of coronary wall imaging. Recently, phase-sensitive dual inversion recovery (PS-DIR) imagingFetal cardiovascular MRI has been hampered by the lack of a reliable cardiac gating signal. A recently proposed solution to this problem is metric optimized gating (MOG)[1] was proposed to alleviate the burden of nulling the blood signal and permitted more timing flexibility in planning for coronary wall imaging. This work investigates the utilization of PS-DIR in the assessment of coronary artery thickening in patients with coronary artery diseases (CAD).