Simultaneous Multi-Slice Flyback Echo Planar Imaging with Auto-Calibration

Kangrong Zhu¹, Adam Kerr¹, John M. Pauly¹

The Blipped-CAIPI technique performs simultaneous multi-slice EPI acquisition with reduced g-factor penalty, but usually requires external calibration scans for image reconstruction. In this work, a data acquisition scheme which does not need any external calibration scans is designed for simultaneous multi-slice EPI and is demonstrated in in vivo brain imaging. The internal auto-calibration in the proposed method minimizes the image artifacts introduced by the mismatch between the calibration data and the accelerated data. The reconstructed images of the proposed method can have higher SNR than the Blipped-CAIPI method if the internal auto-calibration signal is included in the final images.