• Kawin Setsompop, Qiuyun Fan, Jason Stockmann, Berkin Bilgic, Susie Huang, Stephen F Cauley, Aapo Nummenmaa, Fuyixue Wang, Yogesh Rathi, Thomas Witzel, and Lawrence L Wald.
• Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts, USA.
• Magn Reson Med. 2018 Jan 1; 79 (1): 141-151.

PurposeTo develop an efficient acquisition for high-resolution diffusion imaging and allow in vivo whole-brain acquisitions at 600- to 700-μm isotropic resolution.MethodsWe combine blipped-controlled aliasing in parallel imaging simultaneous multislice (SMS) with a novel slab radiofrequency (RF) encoding gSlider (generalized slice-dithered enhanced resolution) to form a signal-to-noise ratio-efficient volumetric simultaneous multislab acquisition. Here, multiple thin slabs are acquired simultaneously with controlled aliasing, and unaliased with parallel imaging. To achieve high resolution in the slice direction, the slab is volumetrically encoded using RF encoding with a scheme similar to Hadamard encoding. However, with gSlider, the RF-encoding bases are specifically designed to be highly independent and provide high image signal-to-noise ratio in each slab acquisition to enable self-navigation of the diffusion's phase corruption. Finally, the method is combined with zoomed imaging (while retaining whole-brain coverage) to facilitate low-distortion single-shot in-plane encoding with echo-planar imaging at high resolution.ResultsA 10-slices-per-shot gSlider-SMS acquisition was used to acquire whole-brain data at 660 and 760 μm isotropic resolution with b-values of 1500 and 1800 s/mm2 , respectively. Data were acquired on the Connectome 3 Tesla scanner with 64-channel head coil. High-quality data with excellent contrast were achieved at these resolutions, which enable the visualization of fine-scale structures.ConclusionsThe gSlider-SMS approach provides a new, efficient way to acquire high-resolution diffusion data. Magn Reson Med 79:141-151, 2018. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.© 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

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