GRAPPA-Accelerated Short Axis BLADE EPI for Multi-Shot Diffusion Weighted Imaging

Alto Stemmer¹, Berthold Kiefer¹

In this work the traverse speed along the phase encoding direction of DW EPI is maximized by the combination of a short-axis BLADE k-space trajectory with parallel imaging. Sensitivity to motion and flow is reduced by acquiring the coil calibration data for each blade by a second EPI echo train between excitation and diffusion sensitization. The traverse speed during the acquisition of the sufficiently sampled calibration data is adjusted to the undersampled imaging echo train by reducing the echo spacing and the number of samples per readout.