High angularly resolved diffusion imaging with accelerated multi-shot acquisition and compressed sensing

Target Audience: MR physicists and brain researchers with an interest for novel diffusion-imaging schemes. Purpose: High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) is a diffusion encoding scheme for resolving intra-voxel fiber structures and crossings. It typically involves acquiring as many as a few hundred diffusion weighted images using a single-shot EPI sequence. The main factors limiting its usefulness and clinical applicability may be the length of the acquisition process and the vulnerability of the single-shot EPI sequence to geometric distortions, especially at high field strengths. The purpose of the present work is to introduce a fast HARDI method mostly insensitive to distortion by accelerating the acquisition both in k-space (to reduce distortion) and in the diffusion-encoding space (to reduce acquisition time).