Accelerated diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging with self-navigated, phase corrected tilted kernel reconstruction of phase encoded and point spread function encoded k-space

Abstract

Systems and methods for accelerated diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging using a tilted reconstruction kernel to synthesize unsampled k-space data in phase encoded and point spread function ('PSF') encoded k-space data are provided. Images reconstructed from the data have reduced B-related distortions and reduced T* blurring. In general, data are acquired with systematically optimized undersampling of the PSF and phase encoding subspace. Parallel imaging reconstruction is implemented with a Binhomogeneity informed approach to achieve greater than twenty-fold acceleration of the PSF encoding dimension. A tilted reconstruction kernel is used to exploit the correlations in the phase encoding-PSF encoding subspace. Self-navigated phase corrections are computed from the acquired data and used to synthesize the unsampled k-space data.