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Abstract #2061

Simultaneous Multislice Readout-Segmented Diffusion-Weighted EPI with Blipped-Controlled Aliasing

Samantha J. Holdsworth1, Rafael O'Halloran1, Anh Tu Van1, Eric Aboussouan1, William A. Grissom2, Anuj Sharma2, Murat Aksoy, Julian R. Maclaren, Stefan Skare3, Roland Bammer

1 (Equal contribution): Center for Quantitative Neuroimaging, Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States; 2 (Equal contribution): Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States; 3Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden


Readout-segmented EPI (RS-EPI) has been shown as a promising candidate for reducing distortion in diffusion-weighted (DW)-EPI while being robust to motion-induced phase errors. However, the requirement of several adjacent segments (or 'blinds') in RS-EPI can make the scan time can prohibitively long particularly for thin slices which require a large number of slices to achieve full brain coverage. In this work, we reduce the minimum TR in RS-EPI with the use a simultaneous multislice acquisition using PINS multiband pulses coupled with blipped-controlled aliasing.