[Study of elliptical centric view ordering technique with spectrally selected inversion recovery pulse (spec-IR pulse)].

Among several techniques for contrast-enhanced MRA, the elliptical centric view ordering method, originally developed at the Mayo Clinic, is a promising one. It has been difficult to apply a fat-suppression prepulse, mainly because the conventional fat suppression method requires a longer acquisition time during sampling of the low-frequency domain in k-space, and it causes severe image distortion due to the great change in longitudinal magnetization derived from fat tissue. We developed a novel method to append fat saturation to the elliptical centric view ordering technique, and assessed the feasibility of its use. Our method is to apply fat-saturation pulses only at selected sampling points when any gradient is applied in the slice-encoding direction. In this way, we achieved efficient suppression of fat-derived signal within a relatively short time, comparable to that of the conventional fat-saturation method, and succeeded in minimizing artifacts.