Andrii Y Petrov1, Michael Herbst1,2, and V Andrew Stenger1
1Department of Medicine, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, United States, 2Department of Radiology and Medical Physics, University Medical Center Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Sub-second whole brain imaging using Simultaneous Multi-Slice (SMS) imaging is of particular interest in Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Faster acquisitions with higher temporal sampling of the BOLD time course provides several advantages including increased sensitivity in detecting functional activation, the possibility of filtering out physiological noise for improving temporal SNR, and freezing out head motion. The most commonly used strategy to accelerate image acquisition time using SMS involves using parallel imaging methods. We propose to accelerate SMS imaging by under sampling the number of excited slices in the kz-t domain and L+S matrix decomposition method for reconstruction of slice aliased functional images. We present human fMRI results at 3T using 3D spiral sampling with SMS excitation and L+S reconstruction of the aliased slice data.