Samantha J. Holdsworth1,
Rafael O'Halloran1, Anh Tu Van1, Eric Aboussouan1,
William A. Grissom2, Anuj Sharma2, Murat Aksoy, Julian
R. Maclaren, Stefan Skare3, Roland Bammer
1
(Equal contribution): Center for Quantitative Neuroimaging, Department of
Radiology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, United States; 2
(Equal contribution): Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, TN, United States; 3Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska
Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
Readout-segmented EPI (RS-EPI) has been shown as a promising candidate for reducing distortion in diffusion-weighted (DW)-EPI while being robust to motion-induced phase errors. However, the requirement of several adjacent segments (or 'blinds') in RS-EPI can make the scan time can prohibitively long particularly for thin slices which require a large number of slices to achieve full brain coverage. In this work, we reduce the minimum TR in RS-EPI with the use a simultaneous multislice acquisition using PINS multiband pulses coupled with blipped-controlled aliasing.