Intracranial Vessel Wall Imaging
“In recent years, intracranial vessel wall (VW) magnetic resonance (MR) imaging has seen an exponential increase in popularity and clinical applicability…. insight into causes of ischemic stroke has led to a trend toward imaging the intracranial vasculature.
Traditional imaging methods for visualizing the intracranial arteries include intra-arterial digital subtraction angiography (DSA), computed tomographic (CT) angiography, Doppler ultrasonography (US), and MR angiography… all of these techniques, except for Doppler US, have the disadvantage of only depicting the arterial lumen (including possible stenoses) and not the culprit VW itself.
Intracranial VW imaging has two major advantages over DSA, CT angiography, and MR angiography: it can depict non-stenotic lesions and it can further characterize stenotic lesions that have already been detected with common angiographic methods.” Netherlands (Reference)