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MRI Vessel Wall Imaging Overview

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Today, we're going to talk a little bit about

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vessel wall imaging.

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You need a very high resolution black blood technique.

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Typically, you want to use a 3 T magnet

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and a 3D acquisition with isotropic voxels

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with a very small 0.4 to 0.7 millimeter range.

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It's done with a turbo fast spin echo technique

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with variable low refocusing flip angles,

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and you might know it better as SPACE or

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CUBE or VISTA or some other vendor name.

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There are a few main things we want to talk about

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with intracranial steno-occlusive disease.

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Atherosclerotic disease has eccentric wall enhancement,

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vasculitis tends to have concentric wall enhancement.

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RCVS has some wall thickening

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but little to no enhancement.

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Moya moya disease has no enhancement.

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And dissection,

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you can see the intimal flap on T2 weighted

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high resolution images and intramural hematoma

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on T1 weighted images.

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Typically, though,

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what you're doing is T1 weighted images,

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pre and post-contrast,

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to differentiate the various entities.

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If you do vessel wall imaging with RCVS,

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you will see a little thickened wall,

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but you don't really see enhancement

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because it's vasospasm and not really inflammation.

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You can see the narrowings of the vessels here

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and the PCAs and the MCAs,

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and the proximal ACAs.

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And then, primary CNS vasculitis is an inflammatory process

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and what you tend to get is circumferential,

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smooth circumferential thickening

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like you can see in the distal ICA

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and proximal MCA here,

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and you can see narrowing of the vessel on this MRA.

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This was from a nice paper by Dr. Obusez

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and AJNR in 2014.

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Faculty

Pamela W Schaefer, MD, FACR

Professor of Radiology, Vice Chair of Education

Massachusetts General Hospital

Tags

Vascular Imaging

Vascular

Neuroradiology

Neuro

MRA

Head and Neck

Brain

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