Parallel Imaging Accelerated Susceptibility Imaging with No SNR Penalty

Bing Wu¹, Wei Li², Chunlei Liu²

Susceptibility imaging with SPGR is a considerably long imaging process which limits its clinical feasibility. Acceleration with parallel imaging, however, degrades the SNR in the resulting susceptibility map. In this work, additional data acquisitions are made in the otherwise wasted empty echo space in front of the readout. The SNR improvement gained through multi-echo averaging has been shown to completely offset the SNR loss incurred at an acceleration factor of 4, showing visibly even better SNR than fully sampled dataset at a single TE.