Quick Overview
Please note that there are different common names for this artifact.

Flow effects in MRI produce a range of artifacts, e.g. intravascular signal void by time of flight effects; turbulent dephasing and first echo dephasing, caused by flowing blood.
Through movement of the hydrogen nuclei (e.g. blood flow), there is a location change between the time these nuclei experience a radio frequency pulse and the time the emitted signal is received (because the repetition time is asynchronous with the pulsatile flow).
The blood flow occasionally produces intravascular high signal intensities due to flow related enhancement, even echo rephasing and diastolic pseudogating. The pulsatile laminar flow within vessels often produces a complex multilayered band that usually propagates outside the head in the phase encoded direction. Blood flow artifacts should be considered as a special subgroup of motion artifacts.

Artifacts can be reduced by reduction of phase shifts with flow compensation (gradient moment nulling), suppression of the blood signal with saturation pulses parallel to the slices, synchronization of the imaging sequence with the heart cycle (cardiac triggering) or can be flipped 90° by swapping the phase//frequency encoding directions.

See also Flow Related Enhancement and Flow Effects.

(FLAIR) Fluid attenuation inversion recovery is a special inversion recovery sequence with long TI to remove the effects of fluid from the resulting images. The TI time of the FLAIR pulse sequence is adjusted to the relaxation time of the component that should be suppressed. For fluid suppression the inversion time (long TI) is set to the zero crossing point of fluid, resulting in the signal being 'erased'.
Lesions that are normally covered by bright fluid signals using conventional T2 contrast are made visible by the dark fluid technique FLAIR is an important technique for the differentiation of brain and spine lesions.

See also Inversion Recovery.

Gradient moment nulling used as motion artifact suppression technique (MAST) reduces constant velocity motion distortion in standard spin echo or gradient echo pulse sequences. It is an adjustment to zero at the echo time (TE) of the net moments of the amplitude of the waveform of the magnetic field gradients with time. The zeroth moment is the area under the curve. The first moment is the 'center of gravity' etc.
The aim is to minimize the phase shifts acquired by the transverse magnetization of excited nuclei moving along the gradients (including the effect of refocusing radio frequency pulses), particularly for the reduction of image artifacts due to motion.

(GMR) The application of strategic gradient pulses can compensate the objectionable spin phase effects of flow motion. That means the reducing of flow effects, e.g. gradient moment nulling of the first order of flow. The simplest velocity-compensated pulse sequence is the symmetrical second echo of a spin echo pulse sequence.
Gradient field changes can be configured in such a way that during an echo the magnetization signal vectors for all pixels have zero phase angle independent of velocities, accelerations etc. of the measured tissue. E.g. the adjustment to zero at the time TE of the net moments of the amplitude of the waveform of the magnetic field gradients with time. The zeroth moment is the area under the curve, the first moment is the 'center of gravity' etc. The aim is to minimize the phase shifts acquired by the transverse magnetization of excited nuclei moving along the gradients (including the effect of refocusing RF pulses), particularly for the reduction of image artifacts due to motion.
Also called Flow Compensation (FC), Motion Artifact Suppression Technique (MAST), Flow motion compression (STILL), Gradient Rephasing (GR), Shimadzu Motion Artifact Reduction Technique (SMART).

(ISIS) Image selected in vivo spectroscopy is used as a localization sequence to provide complete gradient controlled three-dimensional localization with a reduced number of sequence cycles, e.g. for in vivo 31P spectroscopy. The ISIS method generates three 180° pulses prior to a 90° pulse, after which the free induction decay is recorded. Specific 180° pulses (slice-selective) are combined and the FID's added or subtracted to generate a spectrum.
An advantage of the ISIS method is that the magnetization (before the final 90° pulse) is predominantly along the z-axis and so T2 effects are relatively small. This explains the value of this technique for 31P data acquisition, because some phosphorus metabolites (e.g. ATP) have short T2 values.
A disadvantage is that eight acquisitions are required to accomplish the spatial localization, therefore the sequence cannot be used for localized shimming. Another problem, because any variation between these data collections (for example, due to movement) will degrade these applications, can be solved by incorporating outer volume suppression techniques such as OSIRIS (modified ISIS).