Zhengguo Tan1, Nan-kuei Chen2
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States; 2Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University, Durham, NC - North Carolina, United States
The sequence that integrates PROPELLER and EPI has proven valuable for studies that require high throughput and tolerance to subject motion. However, the PROPELLER-EPI quality is usually degraded by distortions resulting from background susceptibility field gradients. Although the distortion can potentially be corrected through B0 mapping, it is not easy to use a conventional B0 mapping procedure to quantify the field inhomogeneities that may change from blade to blade due to subject motion. The goal of this study is to characterize the B0 field inhomogeneity patterns directly from each blade of the PROPELLER-EPI data using the k-space energy spectrum analysis.