Method for spatially resolved measurement of blood flow using nuclear magnetic resonance

A method for at least two-dimensional, spatially resolved measurement of blood flow comprising the steps of:

• exciting nuclear spins in, and reading resulting nuclear magnetic signals out of, an examination subject containing a blood vessel having a blood flow therein flowing in a flow direction and having zones adjoining said blood vessel with a flow-sensitive pulse sequence containing mutually perpendicular slice-selection gradients, phase-encoding gradients and read-out gradients, said phase-coding gradients being altered step-by-step in said pulse sequence;
• sampling and digitizing said nuclear magnetic resonance signals and entering the sampled and digitized nuclear magnetic resonance signals into respective rows of a raw data matrix with one row of said raw data matrix being filled per each phase-encoding step;
• applying saturation pulses to said examination subject before said pulse sequence for saturating said zones of said subject adjoining said blood vessel;
• orienting said phase-encoding gradient in said pulse sequence so as to be substantially perpendicular to a flow direction of said blood flow in said vessel;
• and
• reducing the number of phase-encoding steps in comparison to a number of phase-encoding steps required for generating a quadratic observation window given a constant, maximum amplitude of said phase-encoding gradient, so that essentially only nuclear magnetic resonance signals arising from said blood vessel are acquired in the phase-encoding direction.