Meeting Banner
Abstract #4291

Diffusion Weighted Imaging of Spinal Tumors with Reduced Field of View EPI

Samantha J. Holdsworth1, Rafael O'Halloran1, Kristen Yeom1, Murat Aksoy1, Stefan Skare2, Roland Bammer1

1Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States; 2Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden


Diffusion-weighted (DW) and diffusion-tensor (DT) imaging has shown to be important for the assessment of spinal cord pathologies. Spinal cord DTI has been limited due to off-resonance effects that cause large geometric distortion in EPI. The zonally oblique multislice (ZOOM)-EPI technique is an approach which uses a tilted refocusing pulse to reduce the phase-encoding FOV, by which it accelerates phase-encode k-space traversal, thus reducing geometric distortion. Here we demonstrate the feasibility of ZOOM-EPI for assessing spinal tumors at 1.5T and 3T. To demonstrate the potential for further improvements in this technique, we also present distortion-corrected images acquired on a healthy volunteer at 3T.