Accuracy of flow measurement with phase contrast MRI in a stenotic phantom: where should flow be measured?

Methods Herein, a series of detailed experiments are reported for validation of MR measurements of steady and pulsatile flows with stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (SPIV) on three different stenotic models with 50%, 74%, and 87% area occlusions. Mean inlet Reynolds number was 190 for both steady and pulsatile cases, mimicking the flow of the human common iliac artery. Axial PC-MRI images were acquired at three sites: inlet (two diameters proximal to the stenosis), throat, and outlet (two diameters distal to the stenosis) using a 3T TX Achieva Philips MRI scanner with slice thickness = 4 mm, resolution = 1 × 1 mm, TE/TR = 3.0/4.0 ms, field of view = 64 × 64 mm, and velocity encoding (Venc) = 30-200 cm/s depending on the imaging section. For SPIV purposes, a laser light sheet was passed perpendicular to the axis of the phantom to illuminate the flowing fluorescent particles (Fig 1). A set of image pairs were captured using two cameras looking at the phantom at different angles and the fluid velocity was extracted using a cross-correlation scheme, yielding a nominal spatial resolution of 0.2 mm for the velocity data. The temporal resolution of pulsatile flow measurements was 25 ms, corresponding to 40 measurements per second.