Time-Interleaved Parallel Imaging Approach to Separation of Simultaneously Excited Slices

Suchandrima Banerjee¹, Yuval Zur², Atsushi Takahashi¹, Ajit Shankaranarayanan¹, Douglas A.C. Kelley³

Simultaneous multi-slice excitation can reduce the repetition time needed to acquire a fixed number of slices. Its potential has recently been demonstrated for high resolution full-brain diffusion imaging and functional MRI. In previous works that exploited coil sensitivity differences to separate slices that were simultaneously excited by multi-band excitation, calibration data was acquired from a separate scan where each slice was excited independently. In this work we propose a time-interleaved parallel imaging approach to slice separation which avoids additional prescan, provides co-localization between calibration and the actual acquisition and allows periodic re-computation of the kernel in a time-series acquisition.