Bloch-McConnell Simulation for Arterial Blood Contrast at 3T and 7T: Adiabatic Null Passage vs Binomial Magnetization Transfer Preparation

Arterial blood contrast (ABC) uses on-resonance binomial pulse for magnetization transfer preparation to saturate the tissue signal and highlights the contribution of arterioles. Previously, using Bloch-McConnel simulations, we showed that Binomial MT contaminates ABC with T2 contrast. We suggested the use of adiabatic null passage to decrease the T2 effect. We performed Bloch-McConnel simulations at 3T and 7T comparing the performance of binomial and ANP pulses. ANP increased the arterial contribution from 32% to 42% at 3T and from 18% to 30% at 7T. This study concludes that ANP reduces the T2-contamination imposed by binomial MT block and improves ABC.