Huihui Ye1,2, Berkin Bilgic1, Stephen Cauley1, Borjan Gagoski3, Jianghui Zhong2, Yiping Du2, Lawrence L. Wald1, and Kawin Setsompop1
1MGH/A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, MA, United States, 2Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, People's Republic of, 3Boston Children's Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United States
Susceptibility weighted FLASH imaging provides
exquisite soft tissue contrast at high spatial resolution and low distortion,
but at a cost of lengthy acquisition time. In this work, we developed a highly
efficient Echo-Shift wave-CAIPI technique and demonstrated its ability to provide
18-fold acceleration for FLASH acquisitions with minimal noise and artifact
penalties. Instead of conventional single slice or slab echo-shift, we propose an
echo-shift Simultaneous MultiSlice method to enable improved controlled
aliasing and desirable volumetric noise averaging while avoiding slab edge
artifacts. With this technique, we demonstrated high-quality 1.5 mm isotropic
whole-brain susceptibility weighted FLASH at 3T and 7T in 36s.
