Highly accelerated MRI by skipped phase encoding and edge deghosting with array coil enhancement (SPEED-ACE).

Abstract

The fast MRI method of skipped phase encoding and edge deghosting (SPEED) is further developed with array coil enhancement, and thus is termed SPEED-ACE. In SPEED-ACE, k space is sparsely sampled with skipped phase encoding at every Nth step using a set of receiver coils simultaneously, similar to SENSE, leading to sensitivity-weighted images with up to N layers of overlapping aliasing ghosts. The ghosted images are edge enhanced by a differential filter to yield ghosted edge maps, in which the ghost overlapping layers are greatly reduced since the sparseness of edges reduces the chance of ghost overlapping. Typical ghosted edge maps can be adequately modeled with a double-layer structure. By using data from at least three coils through least-square-error minimization, a deghosted edge map is obtained and inverse-filtered into a final deghosted image. In this way, SPEED-ACE partially samples k space with a skip size of N by using multiple receiver coils in parallel, and obtains a fairly good deghosted image with an undersampling factor of N. SPEED-ACE is not limited to the double-layer ghost model, but can be generalized to include more layers of ghosts for more flexible and improved performance. As a new parallel imaging method, SPEED-ACE was tested using in vivo data to demonstrate the possibility of achieving undersampling factors even greater than the number of receiver coils, which is so far not achievable by other parallel imaging methods.