Patent ID: 6994841

Claim:
A method of detecting blood flow abnormality or variation in a vessel or tissue comprising: administering a contrast enhancing amount of a paramagnetic metal containing magnetic resonance magnetic resonance contrast agent into a vessel of a body; imaging at least a portion of the body through which the MR contrast agent passes, with a MR imaging technique, thereby collecting temporally spaced sets of 3-D and 2-D data, each data set collected successively through an acquisition time; forming a time sequence of image data including early image data and later image data; comparing 3-D and 2-D data from the temporally spaced sets of data by evaluating 2-D and 3-D temporally acquired images by comparing ones of said early image data within said acquisition time with ones of said later image data within said acquisition time and their intensity to assess blood flow or angiographic abnormality or variation.