Comparison of fMRI with Accelerated Variable Density Spiral & EPI

Wei Lin¹, Enrico Simonotto¹, Feng Huang¹, Charles Saylor¹, George R. Duensing¹, Arne Reykowski¹

A recently proposed rapid k-space-based parallel imaging method for variable-density (VD) spiral, Generalized GRAPPA for wider spiral bands (GROWL) is applied to fMRI. When compared with standard EPI images acquired with identical scan parameters, VD spiral-in images shows significantly less signal dropout in the frontal orbital region. A second potential advantage is to achieve higher temporal/spatial resolution and larger volume coverage with highly undersampled VD spiral trajectories.