The Application of High-resolution Multi-shot DWI with MUSE reconstruction in the Diagnosis of Active Inflammation in Crohn's Disease

Diffusion-weighted imaging(DWI) has been shown to be useful in evaluation of active bowel inflammation. Single-shot diffusion-weighted echo-planar imaging (ssDW-EPI) was commonly used in previous studies. However, ssDW-EPI suffers from geometric distortion and low spatial resolution. Moreover, the data acquisition of ssDW-EPI in bowel region become more difficult due to serve off-resonance effect. A recently developed multiplexed sensitivity-encoding (MUSE) framework can produce multi-shot DW-EPI (msDW-EPI) data with improved spatial resolution and reduced distortions. In this study, we demonstrated that the higher resolution and better overall image quality of msDW-EPI using MUSE framework potentially increased the accuracy in diagnosing active bowel inflammation.