Time of flight angiography (TOF) is an MRI technique to visualize flow within vessels, without the need to administer contrast. It is based on the phenomenon of flow-related enhancement of spins entering into an imaging slice. As a result of being unsaturated, these spins give more signal that surrounding stationary spins.
With 2-D TOF, multiple thin imaging slices are acquired with a flow-compensated gradient-echo sequence. These images can be combined by using a technique of reconstruction such as maximum intensity projection (MIP), to obtain a 3-D image of the vessels analogous to conventional angiography.
With 3-D TOF, a volume of images is obtained simultaneously by phase-encoding in the slice-select direction. An angiographic appearance can be generated using MIP, as is done with 2-D TOF.