Samantha J. Holdsworth1, Roland Bammer1, Stefan Skare1
1Lucas MRS/I Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
The development of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of the spine has been hindered by the large off-resonance effects problematic for single-shot EPI. Interleaved EPI can be used to reduce image artifacts, however, in the presence of motion, it can lead to undersampling of k-space and corresponding image ghosting. Readout-segmented (RS)-EPI has recently been shown to be a promising alternative pulse sequence for high-resolution DWI of the human brain, which has significantly reduced distortions. The objective of this study was to compare DW images acquired with RS-EPI and EPI. Here we produce images with significantly reduced distortions compared with EPI, and demonstrate distortion-corrected RS-EPI spine data.