Multislice double inversion pulse sequence for efficient black-blood MRI

Over the last several years there has been a rapidly growing interest in high-resolution MRI of the vascular wall to assess the extent of atherosclerotic lesions. Vessels of particular clinical relevance are the carotid and coronary arteries. Currently, the preferred imaging sequence for these studies is a "blackblood" technique based on the double-inversion scheme to nu the blood signal. A critical drawback of the black-blood technique, however, has been its single-slice nature, as there is only one point in time during the recovery of the blood magnetization from inversion at which the signal is completely nulled. Consequently, the total scan time can become prohibitively long, particularly when an imaging protocol includes several series of these datasets. In this work, a multiple-slice double-inversion technique is described that can reduce the scan time by a factor of two or more. It is demonstrated in vivo with examples from carotid and coronary arteries that one can acquire multiple slices with sufficient nulling of blood, following a single set of inversion pulses. (C) 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.