High-fidelity mesoscale in-vivo diffusion MRI through gSlider-BUDA and circular EPI with S-LORAKS reconstruction

To develop a high-fidelity diffusion MRI acquisition and reconstruction framework with reduced echo-train-length for less T₂* image blurring compared to typical highly accelerated echo-planar imaging (EPI) acquisitions at sub-millimeter isotropic resolution.

We first proposed a circular-EPI trajectory with partial Fourier sampling on both the readout and phase-encoding directions to minimize the echo-train-length and echo time. We then utilized this trajectory in an interleaved two-shot EPI acquisition with reversed phase-encoding polarity, to aid in the correction of off-resonance-induced image distortions and provide complementary k-space coverage in the missing partial Fourier regions. Using model-based reconstruction with structured low-rank constraint and smooth phase prior, we corrected the shot-to-shot phase variations across the two shots and recover the missing k-space data. Finally, we combined the proposed acquisition/reconstruction framework with an SNR-efficient RF-encoded simultaneous multi-slab technique, termed gSlider, to achieve high-fidelity 720 µm and 500 µm isotropic resolution in-vivo diffusion MRI.

Both simulation and in-vivo results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed acquisition and reconstruction framework to provide distortion-corrected diffusion imaging at the mesoscale with markedly reduced T₂*-blurring. The in-vivo results of 720 µm and 500 µm datasets show high-fidelity diffusion images with reduced image blurring and echo time using the proposed approaches.

The proposed method provides high-quality distortion-corrected diffusion-weighted images with ∼40% reduction in the echo-train-length and T₂* blurring at 500µm-isotropic-resolution compared to standard multi-shot EPI.