Non-CPMG PROPELLER diffusion imaging: comparison of phase insensitive preparation with split acquisition

Turbo spin echo (TSE) based diffusion weighted (DW) PROPELLER imaging has the advantage of reduced sensitivity to B0 inhomogeneity and T2 decay caused image blurring, comparing to DW-EPI sequence. However, the violation of CPMG condition is a challenge for DW-PROPELLER sequences. Phase insensitive preparation and split acquisition methods can be used to handle the non-CPMG problem. A comparison study of these two methods was performed and the results show that the phase insensitive method has superior image quality while split acquisition method has the advantage of speed and lower SAR.