Reconstruction of highly-accelerated multi-echo fMRI using parametric POCS based multiplexed sensitivity-encoding (POCSMUSE)

Abstract

Multi-echo fMRI is an emerging technique that can improve the fidelity and interpretability of fMRI, such as differentiating BOLD and non-BOLD signals. In multi-echo fMRI acquisition, high acceleration factor for parallel imaging (i.e., R = 3) was used to achieve reasonable TE interval and maintain the same resolution as single-echo acquisition. The accelerated multi-echo data are reconstructed using SENSE, which may suffer from undesired noise amplification. In this study, we proposed a multi-echo multi-segment EPI (MEMS-EPI) technique to acquire multi-echo fMRI with high acceleration factor, and then used parametric POCSMUSE algorithm to reconstruct the data.