Sliding interleaved kY (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 kY (SLINKY) data acquisition strategy, equalizing flow-related signal intensity weighting across the entire slab dimension. This technique demodulates signal intensity changes along the slab direction and can essentially eliminate the SBA while retaining the same or better imaging time efficiency than that of conventional MOTSA, providing robustness to complicated flow patterns and thereby resulting in more accurate depiction of vascular morphology. In addition, this technique does not need specialized reconstruction and extra computation. The unique penalty of this technique is the sensitivity to phase inconsistency in the data. Both phantom and in vivo experiments verify the clinical significance of the technique. The new MRA images acquired with this imaging technique show highly reliable mapping of vascular morphology without the SBA and reduction of signal voids in complex/slow flow regions.