Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) holds great potential to aid the diagnosis of spinal cord pathologies. Single shot EPI (SS-EPI) is mostly implemented for DTI but is significantly limited in clinics by susceptibility inhomogeneity-induced distortions. This is especially problematic in the thoracic region for increased inhomogeneities near lungs. To solve this problem, multi-shot EPI and reduced-FOV methods have been proposed. However, these methods cannot remove distortions completely. In this study, we achieved high-fidelity DTI of the thoracic spinal cord using a distortion-free MS-EPI technique, Point-Spread-Function Encoded EPI (PSF-EPI). Both the efficacy of PSF-EPI in distortion correction and quantitative reproducibility were evaluated.
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