Echo planar time-resolved imaging with subspace reconstruction and optimized spatiotemporal encoding

Abstract

Purpose: To develop new encoding and reconstruction techniques for fast multi-contrast/quantitative imaging.

Methods: The recently proposed Echo Planar Time-resolved Imaging (EPTI) technique can achieve fast distortion- and blurring-free multi-contrast/quantitative imaging. In this work, a subspace reconstruction framework is developed to improve the reconstruction accuracy of EPTI at high encoding accelerations. The number of unknowns in the reconstruction is significantly reduced by modeling the temporal signal evolutions using low-rank subspace. As part of the proposed reconstruction approach, a B₀ -update algorithm and a shot-to-shot B₀ variation correction method are developed to enable the reconstruction of high-resolution tissue phase images and to mitigate artifacts from shot-to-shot phase variations. Moreover, the EPTI concept is extended to 3D k-space for 3D GE-EPTI, where a new "temporal-variant" of CAIPI encoding is proposed to further improve performance.

Results: The effectiveness of the proposed subspace reconstruction was demonstrated first in 2D GESE EPTI, where the reconstruction achieved higher accuracy when compared to conventional B₀ -informed GRAPPA. For 3D GE-EPTI, a retrospective undersampling experiment demonstrates that the new temporal-variant CAIPI encoding can achieve up to 72× acceleration with close to 2× reduction in reconstruction error when compared to conventional spatiotemporal-CAIPI encoding. In a prospective undersampling experiment, high-quality whole-brain $T_2^{\ast }$ and tissue phase maps at 1 mm isotropic resolution were acquired in 52 seconds at 3T using 3D GE-EPTI with temporal-variant CAIPI encoding.

Conclusion: The proposed subspace reconstruction and optimized temporal-variant CAIPI encoding can further improve the performance of EPTI for fast quantitative mapping.

Keywords: EPI; EPTI; fast imaging; quantitative imaging; spatiotemporal encoding; subspace.