Blood Flow Velocity Assessment

Abstract This chapter provides a complete overview of magnetic resonance imaging and measurement of blood flow. Initially, the history of the various developments is discussed, starting with time-of-flight and phase-encoded approaches prior to imaging, and then moves on to the more recent phase-mapping approaches that are now in routine clinical use. The text describes the theory behind velocity phase encoding and how this is used to produce a phase contrast velocity map. Factors affecting the accuracy are then discussed, and the chapter concludes with discussions of methods of accelerating flow measurement toward real-time and the comprehensive imaging of flow using 4D techniques.