Kawin Setsompop1,2, J Cohen-Adad1,2,
J A. McNab1,2, B A. Gagoski3, V J. Wedeen1,2,
L L. Wald1,2
1Radiology, A. A. Martinos Center for
Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, United
States; 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; 3EECS,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
The
acquisition of simultaneous slices using EPI has the potential to increase
the number of diffusion directions obtained per unit time, thus allowing more
diffusion encoding in HARDI and DSI acquisitions in a clinically relevant
scan time. In this work, we apply simultaneous multi-slice method using a
novel blipped-CAIPIRINHA technique to lower the g-factor penalty of parallel
imaging. We validate the method using g-factor maps and bedpostx with HARDI
acquisitions in the brain. We show that with this technique a 10 minutes,
64-direction HARDI acquisition can be acquired in ~3 minutes at no
appreciable loss in SNR or diffusion information.