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PURPOSE: Severe geometric distortions induced by tissue susceptibility, water-fat chemical shift, and eddy currents pose a substantial obstacle in single-shot EPI, especially for high-resolution imaging at ultrahigh field. View angle tilting (VAT)-EPI can mitigate in-plane distortion. However, the accompanied strong image blurring prevented its widespread applications. On the other hand, point-spread function mapping (PSF)-EPI can correct distortion and blurring accurately but requires prolonged scan time. We present fused VAT-PSF-EPI and possibilities for acceleration. METHODS: MR signal equations were explicitly derived to quantify image blurring in VAT-EPI and the maximum acceleration capacity in VAT-PSF-EPI. To validate the theoretical prediction, phantom measurements with varying in-plane parallel imaging factors, slice thicknesses, and RF pulses were conducted at 7 Tesla. In addition, in vivo human brain scans were acquired with T2 and diffusion weighting to assess distortion and blurring correction. RESULTS: VAT can effectively suppress distortion, and the introduced image blurring is corrected through PSF encoding. Up to fourfold acceleration (only 5 shots) in VAT-PSF-EPI was achieved compared with standard PSF-EPI without VAT. VAT-induced signal loss was mitigated by adjusting the sequence parameters and EPI resolution. In vivo T2 -weighted EPI data with 1.4 mm3 resolution demonstrate immunity to water-fat chemical shift-induced distortion. Very high-spatial resolution diffusion-weighted EPI (0.7 × 0.7 × 2.8 mm3 and 1.2 mm3 ) demonstrates the immunity to eddy current-induced distortion. CONCLUSION: VAT-PSF-EPI is a novel spin-echo EPI-based sequence for fast high-resolution diffusion imaging at ultrahigh field.

International audience; The simultaneous multi-slice EPI (SMS-EPI, a.k.a. MB-EPI) sequence has met immense popularity recently in functional neuroimaging. A still less common alternative is the use of 3D-EPI, which offers similar acceleration capabilities. The aim of this work was to compare the SMS-EPI and the 3D-EPI sequences in terms of sampling strategies for the detection of task-evoked activations at 7T using detection theory. To this end, the spatial and temporal resolutions of the sequences were matched (1.6 mm isotropic resolution, TR = 1200 ms) and their excitation profiles were homogenized by means of calibration-free parallel-transmission (Universal Pulses). We used a fast-event "localizer" paradigm of 5:20 min in order to probe sensorimotor functions (visual, auditory and motor tasks) as well as higher level functions (language comprehension, mental calculation), where results from a previous large-scale study at 3T (N = 81) served as ground-truth reference for the brain areas implicated in each cognitive function. In the current study, ten subjects were scanned while their activation maps were generated for each cognitive function with the GLM analysis. The SMS-EPI and 3D-EPI sequences were compared in terms of raw tSNR, t-score testing for the mean signal, activation strength and accuracy of the robust sensorimotor functions. To this end, the sensitivity and specificity of these contrasts were computed by comparing their activation maps to the reference brain areas obtained in the 3T study. Estimated flip angle distributions in the brain reported a normalized root mean square deviation from the target value below 10% for both sequences. The analysis of the t-score testing for the mean signal revealed temporal noise correlations, suggesting the use of this metric instead of the traditional tSNR for testing fMRI sequences. The SMS-EPI and 3D-EPI thereby yielded similar performance from a detection theory perspective.

The aim of this work is to develop a fast and robust CEST sequence in order to allow the acquisition of a whole-brain imaging volume after a single preparation block (snapshot acquisition).A 3D-CEST sequence with an optimized 3D-EPI readout module was developed, which acquires the complete k-space data following a single CEST preparation for 1 saturation offset. Whole-brain mapping of the Z-spectrum with 2 mm isotropic resolution is achieved at 68 saturation frequencies in 5 minutes (4.33 s per offset). We analyzed the B 1 distribution in order to optimize B 1 correction and to provide accurate CEST quantification across the whole brain.We obtained maps for 3 different CEST contrasts from 4 healthy subjects. Based on our B 1 distribution analysis, we conclude that 3 B 1 sampling points allow for sufficient compensation of B 1 variations across most of the brain. Two brain regions, the cerebellum and the temporal lobes, are difficult to quantify at 7 T due to very low B 1 that was achieved in these regions.The proposed sequence enables robust acquisition of 2 mm isotropic whole-brain CEST maps at 7 Tesla within a total scan time of 16 minutes.

State-of-the-art simultaneous-multi-slice (SMS-)EPI and 3D-EPI share several properties that benefit functional MRI acquisition. Both sequences employ equivalent parallel imaging undersampling with controlled aliasing to achieve high temporal sampling rates. As a volumetric imaging sequence, 3D-EPI offers additional means of acceleration complementary to 2D-CAIPIRINHA sampling, such as fast water excitation and elliptical sampling. We performed an application-oriented comparison between a tailored, six-fold CAIPIRINHA-accelerated 3D-EPI protocol at 530 ms temporal and 2.4 mm isotropic spatial resolution and an SMS-EPI protocol with identical spatial and temporal resolution for whole-brain resting-state fMRI at 3 T. The latter required eight-fold slice acceleration to compensate for the lack of elliptical sampling and fast water excitation. Both sequences used vendor-supplied on-line image reconstruction. We acquired test/retest resting-state fMRI scans in ten volunteers, with simultaneous acquisition of cardiac and respiration data, subsequently used for optional physiological noise removal (nuisance regression). We found that the 3D-EPI protocol has significantly increased temporal signal-to-noise ratio throughout the brain as compared to the SMS-EPI protocol, especially when employing motion and nuisance regression. Both sequence types reliably identified known functional networks with stronger functional connectivity values for the 3D-EPI protocol. We conclude that the more time-efficient 3D-EPI primarily benefits from reduced parallel imaging noise due to a higher, actual k-space sampling density compared to SMS-EPI. The resultant BOLD sensitivity increase makes 3D-EPI a valuable alternative to SMS-EPI for whole-brain fMRI at 3 T, with voxel sizes well below 3 mm isotropic and sampling rates high enough to separate dominant cardiac signals from BOLD signals in the frequency domain.

Purpose To develop a reconstruction pipeline that intrinsically accounts for both simultaneous multislice echo planar imaging (SMS-EPI) reconstruction and dynamic slice-specific Nyquist ghosting correction in time-series data. Methods After 1D slice-group average phase correction, the separate polarity (i.e., even and odd echoes) SMS-EPI data were unaliased by slice GeneRalized Autocalibrating Partial Parallel Acquisition. Both the slice-unaliased even and odd echoes were jointly reconstructed using a model-based framework, extended for SMS-EPI reconstruction that estimates a 2D self-phase map, corrects dynamic slice-specific phase errors, and combines data from all coils and echoes to obtain the final images. Results The percentage ghost-to-signal ratios (%GSRs) and its temporal variations for MB3Ry 2 with a field of view/4 shift in a human brain obtained by the proposed dynamic 2D and standard 1D phase corrections were 1.37 ± 0.11 and 2.66 ± 0.16, respectively. Even with a large regularization parameter λ applied in the proposed reconstruction, the smoothing effect in fMRI activation maps was comparable to a very small Gaussian kernel size 1 × 1 × 1 mm3 . Conclusion The proposed reconstruction pipeline reduced slice-specific phase errors in SMS-EPI, resulting in reduction of GSR. It is applicable for functional MRI studies because the smoothing effect caused by the regularization parameter selection can be minimal in a blood-oxygen-level-dependent activation map.

To describe a model-based reconstruction strategy for single-shot echo planar imaging (EPI) that intrinsically accounts for k-space nonuniformity, Nyquist ghosting, and geometric distortions during rather than before or after image reconstruction.Ramp sampling and inhomogeneous B0 field-induced distortion cause the EPI samples to lie on a non-Cartesian grid, thus requiring the nonuniform fast Fourier transform. Additionally, a 2D Nyquist ghost phase correction without the need for extra navigator acquisition is included in the proposed reconstruction. Coil compression is also incorporated to reduce the computational load. The proposed method is applied to phantom and human brain MRI data.The results demonstrate that Nyquist ghosting and geometric distortions are reduced by the proposed reconstruction. The proposed 2D phase correction is superior to a conventional 1D correction. The reductions of both artifacts lead to improved temporal signal-to-noise ratio (tSNR). The virtual coil results suggest that the processing time can be reduced by up to 75%, with a mean tSNR loss of only 3.2% when using 8-virtual instead of 32-physical coils for twofold undersampled data.The proposed reconstruction improves the quality (ghosting, geometry, and tSNR) of EPI without requiring calibration data for Nyquist ghost correction. Magn Reson Med 78:2250-2264, 2017. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

High-resolution diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has great potential to provide unique information about tissue microstructure in-vivo. Although single-shot echo-planar imaging (EPI) is a most popular tool for DWI, its application for high-resolution DWI is limited due to T2* blurring and susceptibility- and eddy-current-induced geometric distortions, especially at ultra-high field (UHF) such as 7T. In this study, we adapt a hybrid spin-warp and echo-planar encoding strategy inspired by point spread function (PSF) mapping and optimize it for high-resolution and distortion-free diffusion imaging applications. More specifically, a 2D navigator echo is added into the original sequence for shot-to-shot motion-induced phase error estimation and correction. The spatial encoding is shared between the PSF and the EPI phase encoding dimension allowing short echo trains to preserve the diffusion and navigator signals efficiently at UHF, where T2 decay is relatively fast. In addition, variable k-space spacing was applied in the PSF dimension and combined with parallel imaging in the EPI-PE dimension to further accelerate the PSF acquisition. The results demonstrate that this method can yield isotropic submillimeter resolution without T2* blurring and geometric distortions at 7T and enables a clear and detailed delineation of human brain structures in-vivo with the diffusion contrasts. In addition, results of the proposed approach for high-resolution diffusion imaging at 3T are presented.

PURPOSE: Head motion is a significant problem in diffusion-weighted imaging as it may cause signal attenuation due to residual dephasing during strong diffusion encoding gradients even in single-shot acquisitions. Here, we present a new real-time method to prevent motion-induced signal loss in DWI of the brain. METHODS: The method requires a fast motion tracking system (optical in the current implementation). Two alterations were made to a standard diffusion-weighted echo-planar imaging sequence: first, real-time motion correction ensures that slices are correctly aligned relative to the moving brain. Second, the tracking data are used to calculate the motion-induced gradient moment imbalance which occurs during the diffusion encoding periods, and a brief gradient blip is inserted immediately prior to the signal readout to restore the gradient moment balance. RESULTS: Phantom experiments show that the direction as well as magnitude of the gradient moment imbalance affects the characteristics of unwanted signal attenuation. In human subjects, the addition of a moment-restoring blip prevented signal loss and improved the reproducibility and reliability of diffusion tensor measures even in the presence of substantial head movements. CONCLUSION: The method presented can improve robustness for clinical routine scanning in populations that are prone to head movements, such as children and uncooperative adult patients.