Suchandrima Banerjee1,
Emine U. Saritas2, Gerd Melkus3, Ajit Shankaranarayanan1
1Applied
Science Lab, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; 2Bioengineering,
University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States; 3Radiology
and Biomedical Imaging, Univerisity of California San Francisco, San
Francisco, CA, United States
2D spatially selective RF excitation obviates the need for a large field-of-view in the phase-encoding direction to avoid aliasing artifacts and can zoom into a region of interest. This reduces distortion in single-shot echo-planar imaging (ssEPI) by reducing readout time, as recently demonstrated by publications on reduced field-of-view (rFOV) diffusion imaging. However the number of slices can be limited due to presence of side lobes with the 2D RF excitation. In this work we demonstrate a tilted 2D RF design which removes the restriction on number of maximum slice locations, while providing robust fat suppression in diffusion-weighted ssEPI.