Kawin
Setsompop1,2, B A. Gagoski3, J Polimeni1,2,
T Witzel1, 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 in EPI has the potential to increase the
temporal sampling rate of fMRI or the number of diffusion directions obtained
per unit time in diffusion imaging. In this work, we introduced a blipped
CAIPIRINHA technique applicable to EPI acquisition and demonstrated its
associated low g-factor penalty and 3x acceleration of the slices per second
of acquisition. 3x slice-accelerated SE-EPI was acquired with retain SNR of
close to unity. The 3x blipped CAIPIRINHA was also combined with 2x
Simultaneous Image Refocusing (SIR) acquisition to create 6 simultaneous
multi-slice GE-EPI acquisition with low g-factor penalty.