An Thanh Vu1, 2, Audrey Chang1, 2, Liyong Chen1, 2, David Feinberg1, 2
1Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States; 2Advanced MRI Technologies, Sebastopol, CA, United States
Simultaneous echo refocused (SIR) EPI has greatly accelerated the acquisition of both fMRI and DTI data sets. However, the effective echo time (TE) of each individual SIR slice can differ by several milliseconds, resulting in slice dependent signal intensity and BOLD contrast. Here, we propose a constant TE version of the SIR method that is able to use TR specific phase correction navigators while maintaining the minimum TE and TR of the original SIR method. SIR with and without constant TE is evaluated in both phantom and human fMRI experiments.