The impact of the dosage of intravenous gadolinium-chelates on the vascular signal intensity in MR angiography

To show the effects of different concentrations of contrast agent on signal time curves and image contrast of abdominal aorta, vena cava and portal vein in comparison to each other as well as liver and spleen. Imaging was carried out in a 1.0 Tesla clinical scanner. Sixty patients were prospectively included and divided into three contrast agent (Gd-DTPA) dosage groups (0.1 mmol/kg, 0.2 mmol/kg and 0.3 mmol/kg). All patients were scanned using a time-resolved 3D FLASH sequence (58 phases) with a 3.75 second acquisition time per phase. Signal time curves and image contrast levels were evaluated. No significant differences were found for the maximum signal enhancement between the groups in the investigated vessels. Image masking, the subtraction of the baseline images, resulted in a substantial improvement in image contrast. However, statistically significant differences between the contrast agent dosage groups could only be found for vena cava and liver. Vessel conspicuity is not significantly improved with an increase of contrast agent dose. However, an increase in contrast agent dosage increases vessel contrast. Our findings suggest that a single dose single station investigation seems to be sufficient for high quality abdominal MRA.