View Angle Tilting in Echo Planar Imaging for Distortion Correction

Sinyeob Ahn¹, Xiaoping Hu¹

Distortion caused by field inhomogeneity is prominent along the phase-encode (PE) direction in echo planar imaging (EPI). This work describes a method for correcting image distortion along the PE direction using a view angle tilting (VAT) technique in spin-echo EPI (SE-EPI). SE-EPI-VAT utilizes the addition of gradient blips along the slice-select direction, concurrently applied with the PE gradient blips, producing an additional phase. This phase offsets an unwanted phase by field inhomogeneity, resulting in the correction of distortion. The proposed method is simple and requires no post-processing. It was validated by a phantom and human brain imaging.