Correlation Imaging for Multi-Scan Acceleration in Clinical MRI

Yu Li¹, Feng Huang², Wei Lin², Randy Duensing², Charles L. Dumoulin¹

Parallel imaging provides a generic solution to accelerating single-scan MRI. However, a clinical MRI protocol needs a series of MRI scans for acquiring a number of images with different contrast and geometry. In the presented work, we propose a new high-speed MRI framework, correlation imaging, that can accelerate multi-scan MRI by combining multi-channel acceleration mechanisms underlying parallel imaging and the shared information of a multi-scan acquisition. In a three-scan anatomical MRI protocol, we demonstrated that correlation imaging optimized for multi-scan MRI outperforms conventional parallel imaging techniques optimized for single-scan MRI.