A CAIPI Approach to Decrease Geometry Factor for Simultaneous Multi-Slice Technique in FMRI

Oregon Convention Center 

FMRI has been a powerful and safe medical imaging tool to study the function of the brain by demonstrating the spatial and temporal changes in brain metabolism in recent decades. To capture brain functionality more efficiently, efforts have been made to accelerate the number of images acquired per unit of time that create each volume image without losing full anatomical structure. The Simultaneous Multi-Slice (SMS) technique provides an alternative reconstruction method where multiple slices are acquired and aliased concurrently. Traditional imaging techniques such as SENSE and GRAPPA can reconstruct an image from less measured data but have their drawbacks. Controlled Aliasing in Parallel Imaging (CAIPI) shifts is a technique where the field-of-view is shifted during image acquisition. We present a novel SMS technique called mSPECS-CAIPI with Through-Plane and In-Plane Acceleration. It combines the image shift method of CAIPI, the CAIPI with view angle tilting technique, and Hadamard phase-encoding. Our proposed approach was applied to a simulation study with preliminary results showing a decrease in the influence of the geometry factor while increasing brain activation detection.

fMRI

SMS

Through-Plane

In-Plane

CAIPI 

Section on Statistics in Imaging