Multishot diffusion-weighted SPLICE PROPELLER MRI of the abdomen

Multishot FSE (fast spin echo)-based diffusion-weighted (DW)PROPELLER (periodically rotated overlapping parallel lines with enhanced reconstruction) MRI offers the potential to reduce susceptibility artifacts associated with single-shot DW-EPI (echo-planar imaging) approaches. However, DW-PROPELLER in the abdomen is challenging due to the large field-of-view and respiratory motion during DW preparation. Incoherent signal phase due to motion will violate the Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) conditions, leading to destructive interference between spin echo and stimulated echo signals and consequent signal cancellation. The SPLICE (split-echo acquisition of FSE signals) technique can mitigate non-CPMG artifacts in FSE-based sequences. For SPLICE, spin echo and stimulated echo are separated by using imbalanced readout gradients and extended acquisition window. Two signal families each with coherent phase properties are acquired at different intervals within the readout window. Separate reconstruction of these two signal families can avoid destructive phase interference. Phantom studies were performed to validate signal phase properties with different initial magnetization phases. This study evaluated the feasibility of combining SPLICE and PROPELLER for DW imaging of the abdomen. It is demonstrated that DW-SPLICE-PROPELLER can effectively mitigate non-CPMG artifacts and improve DW image quality and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map homogeneity.