Reduced-FOV Diffusion Imaging with ZOnal Oblique Multislice (ZOOM) Combined with Readout-Segmented (RS)-EPI

Samantha J. Holdsworth¹, Stefan Skare¹, Rafael Luis O'Hallaran¹, Roland Bammer¹

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) using EPI has been limited by geometric distortion and blurring, particularly in regions with large off-resonance effects. Distortions can be reduced by reducing the phase-encode FOV, and by reducing the echo-spacing. For the former, we implement the ZOnal Oblique Multislice (ZOOM) technique, which uses a tilted refocusing pulse to spatially select a region of interest. To reduce echo-spacing further, we use the readout-segmented (RS)-EPI technique. We show that the combination of the ZOOM pulse and RS-EPI results in images of the spine and orbits with reduced geometric distortion.