A Looping Trajectory for Single-Shot 3D Imaging

Robert Wayne Stobbe¹, Christian Beaulieu¹

A looping trajectory, as one may wind a ball of yarn, is introduced for single-shot 3D image acquisition. When acceleration is constrained for a constant rate of gradient change, a hardware limiting constraint, this rate of change is similar to that of a back-and-forth approach sampling the same k-space volume in the same time. Sampling density and efficiency are addressed and preliminary phantom images created at 4.7 Tesla. Theoretical advantages of the yarn-ball trajectory include improved off-resonant performance, given early sampling of central k-space, and the potential for designed random undersampling to increase the volume of k-space sampled.