Vibhas
Deshpande1, Sudhir Ramanna2,3, David Feinberg2,3
1Siemens Medical Solutions USA., Inc.,
San Francisco, CA, United States; 2Advanced MRI Technologies,
Sebastopol, CA, United States; 3University of California,
Berkeley, CA, United States
To
reduce imaging times in clinical diffusion imaging, the simultaneous image
refocusing (SIR) technique can be utilized to acquire multiple slices in a
single readout, thereby shortening the total scan time. With 2 simultaneously refocused echoes, an
approximate acceleration factor of 1.5 can be achieved as compared to non-SIR
imaging. Results showed that the image
quality using the SIR sequence was comparable to the conventional EPI,
non-SIR sequence. In conclusion, SIR
with 2 simultaneous slices can reduce scan time in diffusion weighted imaging
by a factor of 1.5 with a compromise in spatial distortions and a small
penalty in SNR.