Diffusion Weighted Imaging of Spinal Tumors with Reduced Field of View EPI

Samantha J. Holdsworth¹, Rafael O'Halloran¹, Kristen Yeom¹, Murat Aksoy¹, Stefan Skare², Roland Bammer¹

Diffusion-weighted (DW) and diffusion-tensor (DT) imaging has shown to be important for the assessment of spinal cord pathologies. Spinal cord DTI has been limited due to off-resonance effects that cause large geometric distortion in EPI. The zonally oblique multislice (ZOOM)-EPI technique is an approach which uses a tilted refocusing pulse to reduce the phase-encoding FOV, by which it accelerates phase-encode k-space traversal, thus reducing geometric distortion. Here we demonstrate the feasibility of ZOOM-EPI for assessing spinal tumors at 1.5T and 3T. To demonstrate the potential for further improvements in this technique, we also present distortion-corrected images acquired on a healthy volunteer at 3T.