Optimized Caipirinha Acceleration Patterns for Routine Clinical 3D Imaging

Vibhas Deshpande¹, Dominik Nickel², Randall Kroeker³, Stephan Kannengiesser², Gerhard Laub¹

Shortening scan time in abdominal breath-hold VIBE imaging is important for patient comfort and consistent diagnostic results in sick or uncooperative patients. In this work, a recently proposed parallel imaging method, Caipirinha, was evaluated against standard GRAPPA to find an optimal sampling pattern. Caipirinha reduces g-factor related SNR losses and controls aliasing such that higher accelerations can be used with little compromises in image quality. Caipirinha showed very good results with accelerations 3 and 4, and improvements over GRAPPA. For a typical abdominal exam setup, a 131 pattern (total acceleration=3) pattern was found to be most consistent across all subjects.