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BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: SWI is valuable for characterization of intracranial hemorrhage and mineralization but has long acquisition times. We compared a highly accelerated wave–controlled aliasing in parallel imaging (CAIPI) SWI sequence with 2 commonly used alternatives, standard SWI and T2*-weighted gradient recalled-echo (T2*W GRE), for routine clinical brain imaging at 3T. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 246 consecutive adult patients were prospectively evaluated using a conventional SWI or T2*W GRE sequence and an optimized wave–CAIPI SWI sequence, which was 3–5 times faster than the standard sequence. Two blinded radiologists scored each sequence for the presence of hemorrhage, the number of microhemorrhages, and severity of motion artifacts. Wave–CAIPI SWI was then evaluated in head-to-head comparison with the conventional sequences for visualization of pathology, artifacts, and overall diagnostic quality. Forced-choice comparisons were used for all scores. Wave–CAIPI SWI was tested for superiority relative to T2*W GRE and for noninferiority relative to standard SWI using a 15% noninferiority margin. RESULTS: Compared with T2*W GRE, wave–CAIPI SWI detected hemorrhages in more cases (P

We read with interest the paper published on-line by Chokshi et al[1][1] regarding whether 3D T2 sampling perfection with application-optimized contrasts by using flip angle evolution (SPACE) could replace T2 FSE in spinal imaging. We agree with the authors that 3D T2-SPACE is an excellent sequence

Microbleeds (MBs) are thought to be clusters of hemosiderin-containing macrophages and are more commonly observed in hypertensive microangiopathy (lacunar infarct or intracerebral hemorrhage), cerebral amyloid angiopathy, or cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and