Thomas Oberhammer1, Markus Weiger2,3,
Franciszek Hennel3, Klaas Paul Pruessmann4
1Institute for Biomedical
Engineering, University and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; 2Bruker
BioSpin AG, Faellanden, Switzerland; 3Bruker BioSpin MRI GmbH,
Ettlingen, Germany; 4Institute for Biomedical Engineering,
University & ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
ZTE is an MRI technique with 3D radial centre-out encoding and zero echo time, particularly suited for imaging samples with short T2. ZTE data is inherently incomplete in the k-space centre, which can be addressed by algebraic reconstruction, however, possibly entailing noise amplification and correlation. In this work, the principles of parallel imaging are applied for improving the noise behaviour in ZTE imaging. By means of 1D and 2D simulations it is demonstrated, that, beyond the original purpose of accelerated data acquisition, sensitivity encoding is also capable of handling the ZTE-specific problem of incomplete sampling in central k-space.