RARE/Turbo Spin Echo Imaging with Simultaneous MultiSlice Wave-CAIPI

The acquisition of RARE imaging, which is the most commonly used clinical sequence, can be lengthy particularly if high isotropic resolution is desired. RARE can be accelerated using Simultaneous MultiSlice (SMS) imaging, which enables acceleration without reducing the number of k-space lines, and hence without √R penalty. Recently, MB=8 acceleration in SMS-RARE imaging at 2mm slice resolution has been achieved by Norris et al., through a combination of low-SAR PINS refocusing pulse and blipped-CAIPI parallel imaging method which limits g-factor noise amplification. In this work, we push further in this direction to achieve MB=15 acceleration to allow high quality 1mm isotropic resolution whole-brain T2-weighted RARE imaging to be performed in just 70s. This acceleration level was achieved through a combination of i) MultiPINS RF pulse which reduces SAR of SMS refocusing pulse further by another 2 fold and ii) Wave-CAIPI parallel imaging method which enables MB=15 acceleration at very minor g-factor penalty (gmax=1.41 and gavg=1.12). This highly accelerated RARE sequence can accelerate clinical imaging to increase patient throughput while achieving high quality, high isotropic resolution data.

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