Arjen Lindenholz

97 Comparison of 3T Intracranial Vessel Wall MRI Sequences 4 in the pontine cistern, most likely due to a faster CSF flow, which resulted in still comparable or even higher CNRs of the basilar artery and CSF compared with the intracranial internal carotid arteries and CSF ( Table 2 and Supplemental Table 1 ). This partly subjective determination of the circumferential of the vessel walls and CSF is subject to measurement errors. However, the same approach was used in all 7 variants and therefore it is unlikely that it influenced the relative differences in performance of the compared variants. Third, no histology or in vivo reference standard for vessel wall imaging was available of the vessel wall lesions that were identified in this study. Therefore, no validation against the ground truth could be performed. Earlier reports already described relative high numbers of vessel wall lesions or atherosclerotic plaques in asymptomatic subjects. 28,39,40 In the current study mostly healthy volunteers were used for assessment of the intracranial vessel wall. Larger patient groups, including symptomatic patients, are needed for a more thorough assessment of vessel wall lesion visibility and contrast- enhancement and, subsequently, the true utility of the faster vessel wall variants in practice. Conclusions In this study, a considerably faster clinically feasible vessel wall sequence (4 minutes 39 seconds scan duration) with high SNRs and CNRs was developed, which resulted in a good visibility of the intracranial vessel wall in the axial plane. Qualitative assessment showed promising results in overall image quality and detecting vessel wall lesions. The faster scan duration allows pre- and postcontrast acquisition of vessel wall images with sufficient remaining scan duration for other imaging sequences in patient studies.