Noise reduction in diffusion weighted MRI of the pancreas using an L1-regularized iterative SENSE reconstruction

DWI plays a growing role in the imaging of the pancreas. Current abdominal DWI scans have a large field of view with limited resolution. Approaches for a higher resolution single-shot DW-EPI with SENSE often suffer from g-factor-induced noise band-like artifacts from which the pancreas is significantly affected due to its central location. We use an L1-regularized iterative SENSE reconstruction to obtain high resolution single shot DW-EPI with reduced noise in patients with pancreatic cancer. The employed method reduces the noise band-like artifacts over the pancreas and eliminates the noise bias from the ADC measurements without lengthening scan times.