Experimental O-space turbo spin echo imaging.

Area of Science:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• Medical Imaging Physics

Background:

• Turbo Spin Echo (TSE) accelerates imaging by acquiring multiple echoes per repetition time (TR).
• O-space imaging reduces TRs using nonlinear magnetic fields and surface coils, but has been limited to gradient echo imaging.
• Combining TSE and O-space is challenging due to k-space trajectories and T2-weighting variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a practical method combining TSE and O-space for highly accelerated T2-weighted MRI.
• To overcome challenges in collecting multiple O-space echoes per TR with varying T2-weighting.

Main Methods:

• A modified acquisition order and filtered projection reconstruction were employed.
• The technique addresses artifacts from T2 decay while preserving specific echo time T2 contrast.

Main Results:

• The proposed O-space TSE method successfully produced highly accelerated T2-weighted images.
• Multiple images with varying T2 contrasts were generated from a single dataset.

Conclusions:

• The O-space TSE method requires fewer echoes than conventional TSE and fewer repetitions than conventional O-space.
• It demonstrates superior performance compared to Cartesian SENSE under high undersampling and generates undistorted images with tunable T2 contrast.