Separation of Two Simultaneously Encoded Slices with a Single Coil

Daniel B. Rowe¹, ², Andrew S. Nencka², Andrzej Jesmanowicz², James S. Hyde²

Two MR image slices are simultaneously encoded and a single complex-valued aliased image is measured. From the single complex-valued image, the previously published magnitude-only and the current complex-valued image separation methods are applied. It is shown that the magnitude-only method can have challenges when the difference in phase of the reference images is close to zero. The complex-valued method works extremely well. Reconstructing complex-valued images are important for implementing complex-valued fMRI activation methods. The reconstruction of simultaneously acquired slices alleviates the necessity for slice timing correction and voxels in different slices are temporally aligned to produce proper connectivity maps.