Matthew C. Murphy1, John Huston, III1, Kevin J. Glaser1, Armando Manduca2, Joel P. Felmlee1, Richard L. Ehman1
1Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States; 2Department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States
MR elastography (MRE) is an MR technique for noninvasively measuring tissue stiffness. Some applications, such as the brain, require a volumetric acquisition and 3D inversion because of through-plane wave propagation. An EPI pulse sequence is useful for such an application because it can acquire a volume of data with short acquisition times. However, slice-to-slice discontinuities in the phase of the EPI images can arise will bias the final inversion results. The purpose of this work is to present a filtering method that removes these slice-to-slice discontinuities, and as a result improves MRE repeatability.