Radial Single-Slab 3D Turbo Spin Echo (SPACE)

John P. Mugler, III¹, Simon Bauer², Dominik Paul², Alto Stemmer², Berthold Kiefer²

Optimized, single-slab, 3D fast/turbo spin-echo (FSE/TSE) imaging (e.g., CUBE, SPACE, VISTA) has recently gained popularity for various clinical applications. While commercial implementations use conventional Cartesian sampling of k space, certain applications may benefit from the favorable properties of non-Cartesian k-space trajectories. The purpose of this work was to incorporate radial k-space sampling into optimized, single-slab, 3D FSE/TSE imaging, and to perform a preliminary evaluation of imaging performance. We found that good image quality can be obtained when radial k-space sampling is combined with the very long spin-echo trains and variable-flip-angle refocusing RF pulses used in state-of-the-art single-slab 3D FSE/TSE techniques.