14-Jun-2009, TAU-MR club, Tel Aviv University
Single-Scan Spatially-Encoded MRI: Principles and applications
Noam Ben Eliezer, Chemical Physics Department,  Weizmann Institute of science
Abstract:

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Single-scan magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) protocols underlie a wide variety
of clinical and research studies, including, among others, functional (fMRI) and diffusion
applications. Most common among these “ultrafast” MRI strategies is Echo Planar
Imaging (EPI). Notwithstanding its proven success EPI faces a number of limitations,
mostly as a result of susceptibility and shift heterogeneities that might become
particularly acute at high fields. Recently, an alternative scheme for acquiring
multidimensional MR images in a single-scan was developed, based on spatial rather
than frequency encoding of the spins interactions and possessing a higher built-in
immunity to this kind of heterogeneities. This lecture will review the basic principles of
spatial-encoding, in the context of MRI and NMR. Further analysis of a single-scan
imaging protocol, employing the spatial-encoding approach, will be given, evaluating its
performance vis-à-vis traditional EPI and demonstrating its superiority on a phantom, as
well as in-vivo samples.