Abstract #2974

Reduced Field-Of-View DWI of the Fetal Brain with Adaptive Averaging

Suchandrima Banerjee¹, Orit A. Glenn², Emine U. Saritas³, Xin Mu², Duan Xu², Pauline W. Worters¹, Ajit Shankaranarayanan¹

¹Applied Science Lab, GE Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, United States; ²University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States; ³Bioengineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States

Diffusion weighted imaging of fetal brain can help in assessment of brain development. Unfortunately, consistent image quality and high spatial resolution is difficult to achieve, even with current state of the art technology. In this work we use a reduced field-of-view (rFOV) technique based on 2D spatially selective RF excitation with the single-shot echo-planar imaging sequence to achieve high resolution in fetal brain DWI with less off-resonance artifacts. We also retrospectively employ adaptive averaging to mitigate fetal motion artifacts. Feasibility study in ten subjects demonstrates that the rFOV technique and adaptive averaging can improve image quality of fetal brain DWI.