Faster Acquisition of MR Images with Double Quantum Filtering by Regularization

Genevieve Guillot¹, Yongchao Xu¹, Slawomir Kusmia¹, Hadia Hanachi¹, Jean-Franois Giovannelli², Alain Herment³

MRI with Double Quantum Filter (DQF) gives a direct access to water linked to macromolecules, but requires 16 up to 64 repetitions of the acquisition scheme with different phases of the RF pulses in the DQ filter to select the DQ signal. We reduced the number of phase encoding lines kept in the data for each DQF step, employing a regularization method to compute each image. The acquisition time could be reduced by 2/3 without any significant loss of contrast and minor loss of contrast on contours. Even faster acquisition should be possible with radial or spiral k-space trajectories.