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Abstract #0551

Blipped CAIPIRHINA for Simultaneous Multi-Slice EPI with Reduced G-Factor Penalty

Kawin Setsompop1,2, B A. Gagoski3, J Polimeni1,2, T Witzel1, V J. Wedeen1,2, L L. Wald1,2

1Radiology, A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; 3EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States


The acquisition of simultaneous slices in EPI has the potential to increase the temporal sampling rate of fMRI or the number of diffusion directions obtained per unit time in diffusion imaging. In this work, we introduced a blipped CAIPIRINHA technique applicable to EPI acquisition and demonstrated its associated low g-factor penalty and 3x acceleration of the slices per second of acquisition. 3x slice-accelerated SE-EPI was acquired with retain SNR of close to unity. The 3x blipped CAIPIRINHA was also combined with 2x Simultaneous Image Refocusing (SIR) acquisition to create 6 simultaneous multi-slice GE-EPI acquisition with low g-factor penalty.