A single breath-hold abdominal diffusion-weighted imaging with simultaneous multislice echo-planar imaging

Although respiratory-triggered (RT)-diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has often been used to minimize respiratory motion in abdomen, unstable respiration leads to prolonged scan time without resolving the problem of respiratory motion. Therefore, we proposed a single breath-hold (BH)-DWI with simultaneous multislice (SMS) echo-planar imaging to allow faster acquisition and reliable quantification of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) in abdominal DWI. The BH-DWI with SMS technique reduced the scan time by more than fourfold and demonstrated comparable accuracy and repeatability in ADC quantification with conventional RT-DWI. The proposed method enables to acquire abdominal diffusion-weighted images in a single breath-holding.