Joint Calibrationless Multi-slice Multi-echo Parallel Imaging Reconstruction for Abdominal T2* Mapping

Abstract

T2* mapping in abdominal imaging is challenging due to respiration motions that can result in severe artifacts and affect the accuracy of T2* quantification. Traditional simultaneous autocalibrating and k-space estimation (SAKE) provides a calibrationless parallel imaging approach to reduce the image acquisition time. However, SAKE does not utilize the highly sharable image contents and coil sensitivities among multi-slice multi-echo data. In this study, we proposed a joint calibrationless reconstruction of multi-slice multi-echo images from undersampled MR data for abdominal imaging. Results demonstrated that the resulting T2* maps were in excellent agreement with those from the fully sampled data.