Xiaoping Wu1, Nicolas Boulant2, Vincent Gras2, Jinfeng Tian1, Sebastian Schmitter1, Pierre-Francois Van de Moortele1, and Kamil Ugurbil1
1CMRR, Radiology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States, 2CEA/NeuroSpin, Saclay, France
The Human Connectome Project (HCP) in the WU-Minn consortium aims to
acquire multiband (MB)-accelerated whole brain diffusion MRI (dMRI). Although
shown advantageous over 3T dMRI in inferring connectivity, the 7T acquisition
suffers from transmit B1 inhomogeneity and SAR, the latter currently limiting
the slice acceleration to an MB factor of 2 (MB=2). In this study, we
investigated numerically the highest possible slice acceleration for 7T
HCP-type dMRI acquisition with ~1-mm isotropic resolutions. Our results suggest
that parallel RF transmission can be used to enable MB=4 while improving flip
angle homogeneity across the whole brain as compared to a CP mode.
