Feasibility of Ultra-high Simultaneous Multi-slice and In-plane Accelerations for Cardiac MRI Using Outer Volume Suppression and Leakage-Blocking Reconstruction

Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging has gained increasing interest for enabling high scan-time acceleration at the cost of minimal loss in SNR. However, its applications in cardiac MRI have been limited, as the feasible acceleration is restricted by unfavorable coil geometry. In this study, we investigate the use of outer-volume suppression (OVS) in combination with CAIPIRINHA to promote dissimilarities among the multi-bands. We propose a time and SAR efficient multi-band scheme for OVS and apply these techniques with a leakage blocking reconstruction to increase the feasible acceleration in cardiac cine and perfusion imaging. Combining these techniques, we achieve clinical image quality with 5 fold SMS acceleration in Cine and 16-fold spatial-only acceleration in perfusion MRI.