Rapid and Tissue Specific Susceptibility Imaging with Multi-Echo Multi-Shot EPI Acquisition

Bing Wu¹, Wei Li², Nankuei Chen², Chunlei Liu²

Susceptibility imaging with standard SPGR is a considerably long imaging process which limits its clinical feasibility. Spiral acquisition has been proposed as an alternative to achieve rapid susceptibility imaging. However, spiral trajectory places demanding requirements on the gradient system and is not usually available on commercial scanners. In addition, spiral trajectory is very sensitive to susceptibility distortions. In this work, a multi-echo multi-shot EPI sequence is implemented and used for susceptibility imaging. The result shows that, given the same acquisition time, EPI leads to a susceptibility map with less distortion compared to that of spiral acquisition.