Hing-Chiu Chang1,2, Chun-Jung Juan3,
Yi-Jui Liu4, Chao-Chun Lin2,5, Hao Shen6,
Tzu-Chao Chuang7, Hsiao-Wen Chung2
1Applied Science Laboratory, GE
Healthcare Taiwan, Taipei, Taiwan; 2Institute of Biomedical
Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 3Department
of Radiology, Tri-Service General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan; 4Department
of Automatic Control Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan; 5Department
of Radiology, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan; 6Applied
Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Beijing, China; 7Electrical
Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Current
implementation of PROPELLER-EPI exhibits difficulty in small FOV or non-axial
acquisition due to the aliasing artifact along the phase-encoding direction
of each blade. In this work, we propose a ZOOM-PROPELLER-EPI technique, which
combines the reducing-FOV (rFOV) EPI to obtain sagittal images with a small
FOV. We combined PROPELLER-EPI with three types of rFOV EPI technique based
on inner volume excitation, both phantom and in vivo results demonstrated
effectiveness of ZOOM-PROPELLER-EPI. The proposed method may find
applications in non-axial high-resolution scans such as diffusion-weighted
imaging of the cerebellum.