Super-resolved spatially encoded single-scan 2D MRI.

Single-scan MRI underlies a wide variety of clinical and research activities, including functional and diffusion studies. Most common among these "ultrafast" MRI approaches is echo-planar imaging. Notwithstanding its proven success, echo-planar imaging still faces a number of limitations, particularly as a result of susceptibility heterogeneities and of chemical shift effects that can become acute at high fields. The present study explores a new approach for acquiring multidimensional MR images in a single scan, which possesses a higher built-in immunity to this kind of heterogeneity while retaining echo-planar imaging's temporal and spatial performances. This new protocol combines a novel approach to multidimensional spectroscopy, based on the spatial encoding of the spin interactions, with image reconstruction algorithms based on super-resolution principles. Single-scan two-dimensional MRI examples of the performance improvements provided by the resulting imaging protocol are illustrated using phantom-based and in vivo experiments. (c) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.