VWI-MR – Vessel Wall Imaging using Magnetic Resonance
Magnetic Resonance Vessel Wall Imaging (VWI-MR) is a relatively new technique that allows for the assessment of blood vessel walls. Traditional methods for imaging intracranial and extracranial arteries, such as MR angiography, CT angiography, and digital subtraction angiography (DSA), provide information only about the degree of vessel lumen narrowing in cases of atherosclerotic/inflammatory stenosis and lumen enlargement in aneurysms. However, they do not allow for direct evaluation of the vessel walls.
New VWI-MR Protocol
The VWI-MR protocol allows for the precise diagnosis of vasculopathies in large and medium intracranial vessels that have not yet caused narrowing and therefore would not be visible with routine angiographic techniques. The primary aim of the VWI-MR protocol is to detect and assess atherosclerotic and inflammatory changes in the vessel walls (vasculitis/vasculopathies) by suppressing the blood signal using high-resolution isotropic 3D sequences in the ‘black-blood’ option, such as SPACE (Siemens), VISTA (Philips), and CUBE (GE). The VWI-MR protocol enables differentiation of various causes of vessel lumen narrowing, such as intracranial atherosclerosis and vasculitis or narrowing due to reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome (RCVS). Additionally, VWI-MR can detect many causes of strokes of unknown etiology (cryptogenic stroke) and transient ischemic attacks (TIA).
