Improving the spatial resolution of whole-head magnetic resonance inverse imaging using partition-encoding gradient blips

Using simultaneous acquisition from multiple channels of a radio-frequency (RF) coil array, magnetic resonance inverse imaging (InI) achieves functional MRI acquisitions at a rate of 100 ms per whole-brain volume [1]. InI accelerates the scan by leaving out partition encoding steps and reconstructs images by solving under-determined inverse problems using RF coil sensitivity information. Hence, the correlated spatial information available in the coil array causes spatial blurring in the InI reconstruction. Here, we propose a method that employs gradient blips in the partition encoding direction during the acquisition to provide extra spatial encoding in order to better differentiate signals from different partitions.