Increasing the Resolution of Diffusion-Weighted MRI with Distortion Compensated Orthogonal Acquisitions & Super-Resolution Reconstruction

Benoit Scherrer¹, Ali Gholipour¹, Simon K. Warfield¹

Increasing the spatial resolution in DW-imaging requires sampling of higher frequencies in k-space which is very challenging with a single shot EPI acquisition. We propose to reduce the spatial encoding burden by employing distortion-compensated orthogonal anisotropic acquisitions, and by achieving super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) of the underlying high-resolution image. We demonstrate that our approach provides better results than acquisition of a single isotropic scan for the same acquisition duration time. This work provides for the first time evidence that SRR, which employs conventional single-shot EPI techniques, may enable resolution enhancement in DWI, and may dramatically impact the way to achieve DW-imaging.