Data acquisition acceleration in magnetic resonance angiography applications using magnetization-prepared simultaneous multi-slice acquisition

A system for using magnetic resonance angiography to acquire an image representative of the vasculature of a subject, the system comprising:

• an electrocardiogram device configured to acquire a signal indicative of a cardiac phase of the subject;
• an imaging device comprising a plurality of coils configured to:
• during each heartbeat of the subject, apply a preparation pulse sequence to a volume, the preparation pulse sequence comprising:
• a volume-selective venous suppression pulse that suppresses (a) venous signal from an upper slice in a region of interest, (b) venous signal from one or more upstream slices that are upstream for venous flow in the region of interest, and (c) background signal from the one or more upstream slices,
• a slice-selective background suppression pulse that suppresses background signal of the upper slice,
• a spectrally selective fat suppression pulse applied to the volume to attenuate signal from background fat signal, and
• following each preparation pulse sequence, perform a simultaneous multi-slice acquisition of the upper slice and the one or more upstream slices to update a k-space dataset covering the region of interest;
• and
• a central control computer unit configured to apply a reconstruction process to the k-space dataset to generate one or more images.