Stefan Skare1,
Samantha J. Holdsworth1, Kristen Yeom1, Patrick David
Barnes1, Roland Bammer1
1Radiology,
Short-Axis
readout Propeller EPI (SAP-EPI) and Readout-Segmented EPI (RS-EPI) have been
proposed for use in high resolution diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging. SAP-EPI
and RS-EPI share common characteristics, in that k-space is traversed by
several EPI segments in order to reduce the distortion and blurring that
typically hampers EPI images. Previous work comparing RS-EPI and SAP-EPI
concluded that SAP-EPI suffers from more blurring compared with RS-EPI
despite attempts to correct for distortion. With an improved distortion
correction method, we demonstrate that SAP-EPI results in similar image
resolution to RS-EPI for a given SNR normalized for scan time/slice.