Figure 1
From: Development of a clinically practical whole-brain intracranial vessel wall MRI technique at 3 Tesla
Optimization of echo train length (ETL) and simulation T2 for an 8-min whole-brain intracranial vessel wall imaging protocol. Increasing simulation T2 boosted SNR and CNR while ETL was fixed at 36 and 60 (a and b). As expected, SNR and CNR were reduced as ETL increased while simulation T2 was fixed (c). In a narrowed range of protocol choices (ETL = 52, T2 = 140, 170, 200 ms), an ETL of 52 in combination with a simulation T2 value of 170 ms was shown to reduce the scan time to 8 min and provide significantly increased wall SNR, wall-CSF CNR, and white-gray matter CNR, compared with the original 12 min protocol.