High-Quality Clinical MRI Massively Accelerated with Segmented Echo-Planar Readout and Phase-Cycled Reconstruction

Nan-kuei Chen¹

Every year millions of patients (e.g., children, seriously ill patients and claustrophobic individuals) cannot complete lengthy MRI procedures without sedation or anesthesia, which poses significant risks for serious adverse effects and harm to health. It is highly desirable to design a novel approach to enable millions of patients to complete clinical MRI without the risk of adverse effects associated with sedation / anesthesia. Here we demonstrate that many clinical MRI sequences may be massively accelerated with segmented echo-planar readout, and high-quality data can be reliably obtained by removing the echo-planar related phase errors with a novel phase-cycled reconstruction algorithm.