Impact of flow encoding strategies on velocity and turbulence quantification in 4D flow MRI

Motivation: Blood flow turbulence and velocity quantification with 4D flow MRI is sensitive to imaging parameters such as Venc and undersampling factor, but their impact has not been clearly quantified yet. Goal(s): Use synthetic 4D flow MRI data to determine the impact of encoding directions and strengths for turbulence and velocity quantification. Approach: Personalized synthetic 4D flow MRI data are simulated for a given set of encoding velocity strengths and directions assuming a fixed scan budget of 15 minutes. Results: Turbulent kinetic energy shows large variations depending on the encoding strategy, while velocity magnitudes are marginally affected by the choice. Impact: Based on the simulations, a 7-point dual- approach represents an efficient approach for accurate velocity and turbulence quantification. However, the low-Venc needs to be tuned to be sensitive to the ranges of expected intra-voxel standard deviations.