title: Slab profile encoding (PEN) for minimizing slab boundary artifact in three-dimensional diffusion-weighted multislab acquisition.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To propose a method for mitigating slab boundary artifacts in three-dimensional (3D) multislab diffusion imaging with no or minimal increases in scan time.
  
  
  METHODS
  The multislab acquisition was treated as parallel imaging acquisition where the slab profiles acted as the traditional receiver sensitivity profiles. All the slabs were then reconstructed simultaneously along the slab direction using Cartesian-based sensitivity encoding (SENSE) reconstruction. The slab profile estimation was performed using either a Bloch simulation or a calibration scan.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Both phantom and in vivo results showed negligible slab boundary artifacts after reconstruction using the proposed method. The performance of the proposed method is comparable to the state-of-the-art slab combination method without the scan time penalty that depends on the number of acquired volumes. The obtained g-factor map of the SENSE reconstruction problem showed a maximum g-factor of 1.7 in the region of interest.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We proposed a novel method for mitigating slab boundary artifacts in 3D diffusion imaging by treating the multislab acquisition as a parallel imaging acquisition and reconstructing all slabs simultaneously using Cartesian SENSE. Unlike existing methods, the scan time increase, if any, does not scale with the number of image volumes acquired.
authors.affiliation: Center for Quantitative Neuroimaging, Department of Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
authors.forename: Anh T
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: Van
authors.forename: Murat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Aksoy
authors.forename: Samantha J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Holdsworth
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kopeinigg
authors.forename: Sjoerd B
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Vos
authors.forename: Roland
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bammer
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D016477:Artifacts; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D038524:Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity
keywords: 3D diffusion imaging; boundary artifact; high resolution diffusion imaging; multislab