Neonatal MRI Acceleration Using Correlation Introduced by Across-Slice Data Sparsity

Yu Li¹, Jean Tkach¹, Suhas Kallapur¹, Machiko Ikegami¹, Alan Jobe¹, Charles L. Dumoulin¹

The presented work addresses a clinical challenge to neonatal MRI on a small bore scanner within the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU): The parallel imaging acceleration is limited by the restricted spatial encoding capability of the small coil arrays sized to match the neonatal anatomy on the NICU scanner. In this work, we propose an approach to accelerating multi-slice 2D imaging using image-space correlation introduced by naturally existing MRI k-space data sparsity. The proposed approach is demonstrated in an extreme case: Neonatal MRI performed with a single-channel volume birdcage coil that is incapable of parallel imaging.