It has been shown that the temporal SNR (tSNR) of GRAPPA EPI can be improved by using different autocalibration scan (ACS) acquisitions. We evaluated the impact of using FLASH-ACS for high resolution, GRAPPA accelerated EPI at 7T. We compared the tSNR, ghost levels and distortions characteristics of EPI data reconstructed using SSEPI, MSEPI and FLASH based ACS at different acceleration factors and resolutions. Results showed that the tSNR of GRAPPA accelerated EPI improved by 60-100% when using FLASH-ACS data during image reconstruction. FLASH-ACS reconstructions also had less residual EPI ghost and identical image distortions compared to SSEPI-ACS and MSEPI-ACS.
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