Abstract #3703

Segmented Multi-Echo MPRAGE Acquisition for Accelerated T1-Weighted Brain Imaging

Pavel Falkovskiy¹,², Tobias Kober,¹², Denise Reyes³, Kaely Steinert³, Matthias Seeger⁴, Matthew Bernstein³, Gunnar Krueger,¹²

¹Advanced Clinical Imaging Technology, Siemens Healthcare IM S AW, Lausanne, Switzerland; ²CIBM-AIT, cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; ³Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States; ⁴Laboratory for Probabilistic Machine Learning, cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Patient comfort and short scan times are crucial in clinical settings. The MP-RAGE pulse sequence produces an excellent T1-weighted contrast but has relatively long acquisition times. In contrast to conventional parallel imaging, this work accelerates the acquisition by using an EPI-type multi-echo k-space segmentation scheme. Obtained images were rated to appear with clinically useful image quality at up to 4x scan time reduction (9:14 to 2:20 min). The concept is independent of the coil design and could be applied in situations when parallel imaging technology is limited, e.g. when there are restrictions in imaging dimensions and coil geometry.