New publication in Imaging Neuroscience
We are very happy to announce that our most recent manuscript (https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00085) has just been published in early view in Imaging Neuroscience. We introduced a novel diffusion MRI acquisition and reconstruction approach for ultra-high field (7T) imaging. Our method consists of a navigator-based interleaved echo-planar imaging (NAViEPI) sequence and a joint-k-q-slice reconstruction for shift-encoded sampling (JETS). This enforces consistent effective echo spacing between imaging and navigator echoes, enabling (1) minimal distortion mismatch between echoes, (2) reliable shot-to-shot phase variation estimation, and (3) flexible number of shots for sub-millimeter resolution. Our approach achieves 0.5 x 0.5 x 2.0 mm3 diffusion MRI with whole brain coverage in a scan time of only 98 seconds. Our work is in collaboration with the Ultra-High Field Pre-Development Team at Siemens Healthineers and is the first publication out of our Research Unit grant that was recently funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Research Unit 5534 – MR biosignature at UHF).
In the spirit of reproducible and open science, we published our source code (https://github.com/ZhengguoTan/sigpy) as well as the raw k-space data (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10474402). We also provide interactive demonstrations of the reconstruction procedure (https://github.com/ZhengguoTan/NAViEPI).