Abstract #3467

Schad L, Laun F, Stieltjes B

DTI of the spinal cord is hampered by high demands of resolution and several sources of artefacts. Here we present a cardiac gated inner volume technique combined with an EPI read out that may overcome these problems. The obtained image quality is good and repeated evaluation of the FA and ADC within the spinal cord show a high reproducibility. Since we used two 180 slice selective refocusing pulses in phase direction during a twice refocused spin echo diffusion preparation, the proposed method can be used for multislice acquisition increasing time efficacy and spinal cord coverage.