• Tobias Saam, Jose G Raya, Clemens C Cyran, Katja Bochmann, Georgios Meimarakis, Olaf Dietrich, Dirk A Clevert, Ute Frey, Chun Yuan, Thomas S Hatsukami, Abe Werf, Maximilian F Reiser, and Konstantin Nikolaou.
• Department of Clinical Radiology, University of Munich, Grosshadern Campus, Munich, Germany. Tobias.Saam@med.uni-muenchen.de
• J Cardiovasc Magn Reson. 2009 Oct 27; 11: 41.

BackgroundMost of the carotid plaque MR studies have been performed using black-blood protocols at 1.5 T without parallel imaging techniques. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a multi-sequence, black-blood MR protocol using parallel imaging and a dedicated 4-channel surface coil for vessel wall imaging of the carotid arteries at 3 T.Materials And Methods14 healthy volunteers and 14 patients with intimal thickening as proven by duplex ultrasound had their carotid arteries imaged at 3 T using a multi-sequence protocol (time-of-flight MR angiography, pre-contrast T1w-, PDw- and T2w sequences in the volunteers, additional post-contrast T1w- and dynamic contrast enhanced sequences in patients). To assess intrascan reproducibility, 10 volunteers were scanned twice within 2 weeks.ResultsIntrascan reproducibility for quantitative measurements of lumen, wall and outer wall areas was excellent with intraclass correlation coefficients >0.98 and measurement errors of 1.5%, 4.5% and 1.9%, respectively. Patients had larger wall areas than volunteers in both common carotid and internal carotid arteries and smaller lumen areas in internal carotid arteries (p < 0.001). Positive correlations were found between wall area and cardiovascular risk factors such as age, hypertension, coronary heart disease and hypercholesterolemia (Spearman's r = 0.45-0.76, p < 0.05). No significant correlations were found between wall area and body mass index, gender, diabetes or a family history of cardiovascular disease.ConclusionThe findings of this study indicate that high resolution carotid black-blood 3 T MR with parallel imaging is a fast, reproducible and robust method to assess carotid atherosclerotic plaque in vivo and this method is ready to be used in clinical practice.

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