Fig. 8

Example of dark blood imaging of the lungs using non-contrast, breath-hold 3D uSSFP. Top row 7-mm solid lung nodule is well demonstrated by 3D uSSFP acquired in three orthogonal scan planes. Note that the blood vessels appear uniformly dark. Bottom row Comparison of 12-mm thick maximum intensity projections using VIBE (left) and 3D uSSFP (right). While the lung nodule can be seen with both techniques, the lesion is much more conspicuous with 3D uSSFP due to the low blood pool signals and resultant sparsity of the images