The walls of conduit arteries undergo cyclic stretching from the
periodic fluctuation of arterial pressure. Atherosclerotic lesions
have been shown to localize to regions of excessive stretching
of the arterial wall. We employed a displacement encoding with
stimulated echoes (DENSE) sequence to image the motion of
the common carotid artery wall and map the two-dimensional
(2D) circumferential strain. The sequence utilizes a fully-balanced
steady-state free-precession (SSFP) readout with
0.60 mm in-plane resolution. Preliminary results in volunteers at
1.5T (N = 4) and 3.0T (N = 17) are compared to measurements
of the lumen circumference from cine images. The agreement
between the two independent measurements at both field
strengths (P ≤ 0.001) supports the use of DENSE as a means to
map the pulsatile strain in the carotid artery wall