Evaluation of Acceleration Methods for Clinical T1-weighted (T1w) Vessel Wall Imaging

Motivation: Clinical VWI scans demand high spatial resolutions, which lead to extended acquisition times, potentially causing limited field-of-view (FOV), motion artifacts, and patient burden. Goal(s): We evaluated FDA-approved acceleration methods for 3D T1w SPACE to develop optimized protocols for clinical VWI studies. Approach: Compressed Sensing (CS) and CAIPI acceleration techniques optimized to reduce scan times and provide whole-head coverage were compared against our current GRAPPA accelerated limited-FOV clinical protocol. Results: The whole-head FOV combined with CS yielded image quality comparable to our current clinical protocol but with almost half the scan time, promising significant reductions in lengthy clinical VWI protocols and patient burden. Impact: Compressed Sensing enabled increased FOV imaging with substantially reduced scan times without significant loss of image quality compared to CAIPI and standard-of-care GRAPPA-accelerated techniques for a clinical T1-weighted vessel wall imaging protocol.