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Double-Echo Steady-State (DESS) sequences are a promising candidate for diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) free of geometric distortions. While diffusion weighted DESS (dwDESS) sequences were originally introduced with a unipolar diffusion weighting gradient GD, a bipolar GD is required to obtain a motion robust fully balanced sequence. The inevitable banding artefacts occurring for bipolar GD can be handled via different techniques like gradient spoiling (thus deviating from the fully balanced sequence) or phase cycling. This study compares these techniques to optimize SNR for a given scan time and given diffusion weighting.
Katscher et al. (Wed,) studied this question.