• Yoon-Chul Kim, Jon-Fredrik Nielsen, and Krishna S Nayak.
• Magnetic Resonance Engineering Laboratory, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA. yoonckim@usc.edu
• J Magn Reson Imaging. 2008 Jan 1; 27 (1): 239-45.

PurposeTo develop a method that automatically corrects ghosting artifacts due to echo-misalignment in interleaved gradient-echo echo-planar imaging (EPI) in arbitrary oblique or double-oblique scan planes.Materials And MethodsAn automatic ghosting correction technique was developed based on an alternating EPI acquisition and the phased-array ghost elimination (PAGE) reconstruction method. The direction of k-space traversal is alternated at every temporal frame, enabling lower temporal-resolution ghost-free coil sensitivity maps to be dynamically estimated. The proposed method was compared with conventional one-dimensional (1D) phase correction in axial, oblique, and double-oblique scan planes in phantom and cardiac in vivo studies. The proposed method was also used in conjunction with two-fold acceleration.ResultsThe proposed method with nonaccelerated acquisition provided excellent suppression of ghosting artifacts in all scan planes, and was substantially more effective than conventional 1D phase correction in oblique and double-oblique scan planes. The feasibility of real-time reconstruction using the proposed technique was demonstrated in a scan protocol with 3.1-mm spatial and 60-msec temporal resolution.ConclusionThe proposed technique with nonaccelerated acquisition provides excellent ghost suppression in arbitrary scan orientations without a calibration scan, and can be useful for real-time interactive imaging, in which scan planes are frequently changed with arbitrary oblique orientations.

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