ADVANCES IN DIFFUSION IMAGING USING PARALLEL IMAGING

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. We are continuing our efforts to redefine and improve upon the methodology of DWI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) for the investigators and collaborators on the P41 RR09784 Center for Advanced MR Technology at Stanford effort. SENSitivity Encoding (SENSE) is a valuable complement to regular gradient encoding in MRI. It employs some of the spatial information contained in the individual elements in an RF coil array to achieve a considerable reduction of scanning time. For this reason, SENSE is a promising concept in view of physiological as well as technical limits to efficiently traverse k-space. SENSE can be used to accelerate virtually any conventional MRI technique without interfering with typical contrast mechanisms used in MRI, such as diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). Despite well-known problems, in most cases EPI is still the method of choice for acquiring in-vivo DWI data. With recent achievements in scanning diffusion properties more uniformly in space and resolving more details in voxels that contain more than one fiber tract, the number of measurements has tremendously increased and the role of EPI as a vehicle for fast data acquisition has become even more important.