Eliana NessAiver1, Dan Zhu1, Ari Meir Blitz2, and Daniel Herzka1
1Biomedical Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States, 2Radiology, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, MD, United States
High resolution imaging of the inner ear is a desirable tool for the diagnosis and treatment of inner ear pathologies. In particular, balanced steady state free precession images have a good balance of high SNR, fast imaging times, and novel tissue contrast which yields satisfactory differentiation of inner ear structures. However, it suffers from banding artifacts in areas of field inhomogeneity. While common clinical practice is to combine two images that are 180ยบ phase cycled from one another, which shifts the bands to different locations in each image, this yields only partial mitigation of the artifact. This study applies parallel imaging techniques to acquire four phase cycled images in a similar timeframe to the original two-image acquisition, in order to produce a combined volume with superior banding removal at little to no extra cost over current clinical practice.
