Experimental O-space turbo spin echo imaging

Purpose: Turbo spin echo (TSE) imaging reduces imaging time by acquiring multiple echoes per repetition (TR), requiring fewer TRs. O-space can also require fewer TRs by using a combination of nonlinear magnetic gradient fields and surface coil arrays. Although to date, O-space has only been demonstrated for gradient echo imaging, it is valuable to combine these two techniques. However, collecting multiple O-space echoes per TR is difficult because of the different local k-space trajectories and variable T2-weighting.

Theory and methods: A practical scheme is demonstrated to combine the benefits of TSE and O-space for highly accelerated T2-weighted images. The scheme uses a modified acquisition order and filtered projection reconstruction to reduce artifacts caused by T2 decay, while retaining T2 contrast that corresponds to a specific echo time.

Results: The experiments revealed that the proposed method can produce highly accelerated T2-weighted images. Moreover, the method can generate multiple images with different T2 contrasts from a single dataset.

Conclusions: The proposed O-space TSE imaging method requires fewer echoes than conventional TSE and fewer repetitions than conventional O-space imaging. It retains resilience to undersampling, clearly outperforming Cartesian SENSE at high levels of undersampling, and can generate undistorted images with a range of T2 contrast from a single acquired dataset.