Fig. 1
A Slice positioning: A 3D image volume (25 × 25 × 4 mm3) was positioned perpendicular to the aortic arch. B Radial Phase-Contrast (PC) cine sequence. 1. Slice excitation with a Sinc pulse. 2. Bipolar dephase / rephase gradients for flow compensation. Flow encoding is performed simultaneously with the dephase gradients (blue lines). 3. 3D frequency encoding with an echo asymmetry of 10%. 4. After the readout constant gradient spoiling is applied in all 3 directions. C Used spatial encoding scheme: Spherical 3D k-space data points were sampled using a spiral-shaped trajectory for the radial projections. D To increase robustness the measurement (ns = 1.6 x 105 radial projections) was segmented into 10 smaller subsets, which were applied in a sequential order. Each segment consists of 4 flow-encoding measurements with 1.6 x 104 projections, respectively, which are measured one at a time. Each measurement covers a full 3D sphere in k-space