Dimitrios C. Karampinos1, Suchandrima
Banerjee2, Kevin F. King3, Eric T. Han2,
Thomas M. Link1, Sharmila Majumdar1
1Radiology and Biomedical Imaging,
University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States; 2Applied
Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; 3Applied
Science Laboratory, GE Healthcare, Waukesha, WI, United States
Skeletal
muscle DTI fiber reconstruction close to the aponeuroses is challenging
because of partial volume effects. The spatial resolution of skeletal muscle
single-shot DW-EPI is limited by the low SNR of muscle DWI and the high
sensitivity of single-shot EPI to off-resonance effects. In the present work,
eddy-current compensated diffusion-weighted stimulated echo preparation is
used to increase SNR and is combined with SENSE to decrease the length of EPI
readout. Theoretical results for the SNR efficiency of stimulated echo
preparation with SENSE are derived and in
vivo tensor maps of the calf muscles with an in plane resolution of
1.56x1.56 mm2 are presented.