The Reproducibility & Correlation of Phase Errors in Diffusion Weighted Imaging with the Cardiac Cycle

Rafael Luis O'Halloran¹, Samantha Holdsworth¹, Roland Bammer¹

One of the fundamental problems with multi-shot diffusion weighted MRI is phase mismatch between shots. The ultimate source of these errors is motion, however, one component of it is reproducible and correlated with the cardiac cycle. In this work the reproducibility of cardiac induced phase is investigated with a rapid time-resolved single-shot gradient echo DW-EPI. Phase maps showed that, although there is a large component of the phase that is highly correlated with the cardiac cycle, there are still residual variations in the phase that do not correlate.