Blip up-down acquisition for spin- and gradient-echo imaging (BUDA-SAGE) with self-supervised denoising enables efficient T 2 , T 2 *, para- and dia-magnetic susceptibility mapping.

Purpose: To rapidly obtain high resolution T ₂ , T ₂ *, and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) source separation maps with whole-brain coverage and high geometric fidelity.
Methods: We propose Blip Up-Down Acquisition for Spin And Gradient Echo imaging (BUDA-SAGE), an efficient EPI sequence for quantitative mapping. The acquisition includes multiple T ₂ *-, T ₂ '-, and T ₂ -weighted contrasts. We alternate the phase-encoding polarities across the interleaved shots in this multi-shot navigator-free acquisition. A field map estimated from interim reconstructions was incorporated into the joint multi-shot EPI reconstruction with a structured low rank constraint to eliminate distortion. A self-supervised neural network (NN), MR-Self2Self (MR-S2S), was used to perform denoising to boost SNR. Using Slider encoding allowed us to reach 1 mm isotropic resolution by performing super-resolution reconstruction on volumes acquired with 2 mm slice thickness. Quantitative T ₂ (=1/R ₂ ) and T ₂ * (=1/R ₂ *) maps were obtained using Bloch dictionary matching on the reconstructed echoes. QSM was estimated using nonlinear dipole inversion on the gradient echoes. Starting from the estimated R ₂ /R ₂ * maps, R ₂ ' information was derived and used in source separation QSM reconstruction, which provided additional para- and dia-magnetic susceptibility maps.
Results: In vivo results demonstrate the ability of BUDA-SAGE to provide whole-brain, distortion-free, high-resolution, multi-contrast images and quantitative T ₂ /T ₂ * maps, as well as yielding para- and dia-magnetic susceptibility maps. Estimated quantitative maps showed comparable values to conventional mapping methods in phantom and in vivo measurements.
Conclusion: BUDA-SAGE acquisition with self-supervised denoising and Slider encoding enables rapid, distortion-free, whole-brain T ₂ /T ₂ * mapping at 1 mm isotropic resolution under 90 s.
(© 2022 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.)