Mayur Narsude1, 2, Jos Marques1, 2, Wietske van der Zwaag1, 2, Tobias Kober1, 2, Rolf Gruetter1, 2
1Laboratory for Functional and Metabolic Imaging, Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; 2Department of Radiology,, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
EPI acquisition times can be shortened by partial Fourier acquisition, parallel imaging and sparse data sampling. We present an approach to reduce the EPI volume acquisition time which accelerates in the slice-encode dimension of 3D-EPI enabling an up to 8 fold acceleration with an 8 channel coil at 7T with good image quality. In the PACEUP-3DEPI (ksPACE acqUisition Parallelized 3DEPI) pulse sequence 2 kspace planes are encoded per rf excitation. 96x96x40 matrix volumes were acquired in 0.9s. BOLD sensitivity was tested via resting state networks and found to be increased compared to 2D and 3D-EPI.