Removing Echo Planar Imaging Banding Artifact Using Phase Matching

Dan Xu¹, Kenichi Kanda¹, Kevin F. King¹, Zhenghui Zhang¹, Robert D. Peters¹

Conventional echo planar imaging (EPI) phase correction can introduce a channel dependent phase which could conflict with parallel imaging unaliasing especially for high channel count coils, leading to banding or residual aliasing artifacts in the final images. In this paper we propose a phase matching method to remove the incompatibility by introducing a channel dependent phase while retaining the odd-even phase correction capability, thereby producing images free of banding and aliasing artifacts, in addition to minimizing EPI Nyquist ghost.