Systematic noise compensation for simultaneous multislice acquisition using rosette trajectories (SMART).

Simultaneous multislice acquisition using rosette trajectories (SMART) is a recently introduced functional magnetic resonance imaging pulse sequence that offers high-speed data acquisition by simultaneously exciting several slices. A drawback to its benefit of rapid acquisition is the cumulative effect of the systematic noise present in the off-resonant slices. In this work, a systematic noise compensation method is implemented to gauge the performance of the multislice SMART method versus a single-slice rosette method in a motor activation study. The normalized standard deviation of the noise-compensated image timecourse is reduced by 25% (single-slice rosette) and 62% (SMART), and the normalized volume of motor activation is increased by 25% (single-slice rosette) and 44% (SMART). The noise-compensated SMART method has an average timecourse standard deviation only 9% higher than the noise-compensated single-slice rosette method, while increasing the acquisition rate threefold.