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Magnetic resonance provides a wide variety of possibilities for arterial and venous blood vessel imaging in all vascular territories. This article provides a brief review of the technical principles of MR angiography. The first section is dedicated to non-contrast-enhanced angiography techniques and includes several distinct approaches: time-of-flight, phase contrast, triggered angiography non-contrast-enhanced, and balanced steady-state free precession. The second section relates to the contrast-enhanced and time-resolved contrast-enhanced MR angiography methods. The latest technical developments in MR imaging hardware, sequences and software, coil technology, and reconstruction capability allow dynamic MR angiography performance similar to CT angiography, without risks of iodine contrast agent and ionizing radiation exposure.

Four-dimensional time-resolved MR angiography (4D-MRA) using keyhole imaging techniques is a new method of performing contrastenhanced vascular imaging. Combining parallel imaging and keyhole imaging techniques, it is possible to obtain dynamic MRA scans up to 60 times faster, thereby achieving subsecond sampling of the contrast hemodynamics. Furthermore, imaging at 3 T gives higher signal, thus affording higher spatial resolution and allowing dynamic 3D MRA to approach the diagnostic performance of conventional digital subtraction angiography. This article presents the authors' clinical experience using 4D-MRA to evaluate various vascular abnormalities in the brain, spine, orbits, and neck at 3 T, demonstrates the imaging findings of this novel technique, and discusses its advantages and use in current neuroradiology practice.