A major component of the Human Connectome Project (HCP) in the WU-Minn consortium is multiband (MB)-accelerated whole-brain diffusion MRI (dMRI) at both 3T and 7T. Although having some advantages over 3T dMRI in inferring connectivity, the 7T acquisition suffers from RF nonuniformity and is limited to MB2 acceleration because of SAR. Here, we demonstrate the utility of RF parallel transmission (pTx) for 7T HCP-type dMRI with ~1-mm isotropic resolution. Our results demonstrate that pTx can significantly improve RF uniformity across the entire brain and enable higher slice acceleration relative to single transmit configurations, thereby holding great potential for acquiring high quality, high resolution and high efficiency dMRI data.
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