Joint Velocity and Acceleration Encoding for Improved Pressure Gradient Mapping in Flow Imaging

In this work, we introduce an optimized motion encoding strategy for flow measurements that simultaneously and non-colinearly encodes velocity and acceleration into data phase. This enables velocity-based flow measurements and improves pressure gradient mapping derived from the acceleration data. The method is tested in a stenotic flow phantom, where the proposed method shows good velocity agreement with conventional 4D-flow methods, while also producing improved pressure gradient maps when compared to both 4D-flow and a CFD reference.