Sinyeob Ahn1, Xiaoping Hu1
1Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology/Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States
Image distortion and signal loss are detrimental artifacts caused by field inhomogeneity in gradient-echo EPI (GE-EPI). This work describes the combination of view angle tilting (VAT) with z-shimming to address both artifacts in GE-EPI. VAT was implemented with parallel imaging to make it practical for EPI. VAT corrects in-plane distortion in the phase-encoding direction while z-shimming reduces signal loss. The combined sequence was used to generate images with improved quality, particularly in the frontal and inferior orbito-frontal regions of human brain.