Jonathan R. Polimeni1,
Himanshu Bhat2, Thomas Benner3, Thorsten Feiweier4,
Souheil J. Inati5, Thomas Witzel1, Keith A. Heberlein6,
Lawrence L. Wald1, 7
1A.A.
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Harvard
Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United
States; 2Siemens Medical Solutions, Charlestown, MA, United
States; 3Siemens AG, Healthcare Sector, Erlangen, Bavaria,
Germany; 4Siemens AG, Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany; 5National
Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, United States; 6Siemens
Healthcare USA, Charlestown, MA, United States; 7Harvard-MIT Division
of Health Sciences and Technology , MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States
Conventional auto-calibration data acquisition strategies for accelerated EPI seek to match the echo spacing of the image data, and therefore employ a segmented EPI acquisition. This approach is vulnerable to patient movement or respiration-induced dynamic B0 changes. Here we introduce a new auto-calibration method based on acquiring multi-shot, multi-slice auto-calibration data where the multiple segments in a given slice are acquired sequentially in time, shortening the time interval between segments. Our results show that the proposed method provides higher temporal SNR and reduced motion sensitivity that the conventional approach, while maintaining the echo spacing of the image acquisition.