Imaging Services
MRA of the Vascular, Upper Extremity
Basics: What is an MRA upper extremity?
MRA stands for “magnetic resonance angiography”. In short, MRA of the upper extremities is an extremely accurate noninvasive test (other than an IV), to get a close look at the arteries in your upper extremities. This may include your upper chest, lower neck, or may focus on the blood vessels of one of your shoulders, arms, forearms, or hand. More specifically, this may include looking at the pulmonary vessels, aortic arch, great vessels, subclavian, axillary arteries, as well as the arteries in your arm and forearm. Usually, there are specific symptoms (arm claudication, subclavian steal), which leads your doctor to suspect an abnormality in a specific region. Unlike MRA of the Neck, where the region covered is pretty much the same from person to person, this exam (MRA Upper Extremity) is custom tailored to each person based on symptoms. This is because the “Upper Extremity” exam may include parts of your neck, chest and arms. This is a potentially large area to cover with high resolution, so we try to focus on a particular region. In addition, because of the physics of looking at different sized body parts (chest and arms) and the fact that the arms will sit in the periphery of the magnetic field rather than in the center, it is an exam that requires particular skill on the part of the MRI technologist.
Do you have to put an IV in to inject dye?
Yes.
Discussion of images above:
The above set of images provides excellent visualization of the vessels of the upper chest, arms, and lower neck, during different times/phases (early arterial, mid arterial, and venous), of the ascending aorta, aortic arch, subclavian arteries, axillary arteries, great vessels (brachiocephalic, left common carotid, left subclavian artery), beginnings of the left and right vertebral arteries. In this case, there is also very good visualization of the jugular veins, brachiocephalic veins, and superior vena cava.
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