Ultra-fast MRI of the human brain with simultaneous multi-slice imaging.

The recent advancement of simultaneous multi-slice imaging using multiband excitation has dramatically reduced the scan time of the brain. The evolution of this parallel imaging technique began over a decade ago and through recent sequence improvements has reduced the acquisition time of multi-slice EPI by over ten fold. This technique has recently become extremely useful for (i) functional MRI studies improving the statistical definition of neuronal networks, and (ii) diffusion based fiber tractography to visualize structural connections in the human brain. Several applications and evaluations are underway which show promise for this family of fast imaging sequences.