Increased Slice Coverage for Black-Blood Arterial-Wall Imaging with Double-Inversion FSE

Introduction: The most commonly used method for black-blood MR imaging of atherosclerotic plaque is a fast-spin-echo (FSE) pulse sequence with doubleinversion pulses employed to achieve T1-nulling of flowing blood. This has the drawback of optimally suppressing blood signals for only one slice when a multislice sequence is executed (e.g., Fig. 1). Various schemes have been proposed [15] to fit more slices into the same imaging time, including one [5] which reorders the slice acquisition [6] to insure that the center of k space is crossed at the T1-null point for each slice. We propose here a new method for producing a relatively large number of slices while suppressing both high and low-spatial-frequency signals from flowing blood.