Improved Quality and Diagnostic Confidence Achieved by Use of Dose-Reduced Gadolinium Blood-Pool Agents for Time-Resolved Intracranial MR Angiography

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:Time-resolved MRA with the use of bolus injection of paramagnetic agents has proved valuable in neurovascular imaging. Standard contrast agents have limited blood-pool residence times, motivating the development of highly protein-bound blood-pool agents with greater relaxivity and longer intravascular residence, affording improved image quality at lesser doses. This study represents the first comparison of blood-pool agents to standard agents in time-resolved cerebral MRA.