Onur Afacan1,2, Dana H. Brooks1,
W. Scott Hoge2, Istvan A. Morocz2
1ECE Dept., Northeastern
University, Boston, MA, United States; 2Radiology, Brigham & Women's
Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
In this work we evaluated the temporal performance of three acceleration techniques applied to multi-shot 3D EPI for fMRI. In particular we implemented a multi-shot sequence accelerated by GRAPPA, UNFOLD, and a combination of UNFOLD and GRAPPA, all along the slice encoding direction. We show results from a phantom experiment and an in-vivo fMRI study that compares the accelerated sequences to a full 3DEPI acquisition in terms of temporal SNR, temporal artifacts, and functional sensitivity.