A numerical study of magnetic resonance images of pulsatile flow in a two dimensional carotid bifurcation: a numerical study of MR images.

A numerical method to simulate magnetic resonance angiographic images is proposed. The new method greatly simplifies the calculation of the average phase in a voxel, the bottleneck of previous simulations, and reduces the computation time by more than a factor of 5. Both the Navier-Stokes and the Bloch equations are solved on the same mesh to obtain the distributions of the modulus and phase of the magnetization. The data in the frequency domain are reordered according to the gating strategy to generate the final images. Pulsatile flow through a 2D normal carotid bifurcation is considered as a test case. Images for magnetic resonance angiography with an uncompensated gradient waveform, a velocity-compensated gradient waveform and an uncompensated short-TE gradient waveform are compared. Systolic gating images are shown to have degraded image quality. Images acquired with diastolic-gating have little variation in magnetization strength throughout the pulsatile cycle and provide a better representation of the vessel lumen.