Self-Calibrating Aliasing-Controlled Simultaneous Multi-Slice Reconstruction for Diffusion MRI

To jointly resolve inter-slice leakages and in-plane aliasing for combined in-plane- and slice-accelerated diffusion MRI data, we proposed a novel, one-step solution for SMS-reconstruction optimally exploiting self-calibrating data from generalized 3D Fourier encoding perspective. To this end, we propose a generalized SMS forward signal model with an extended controlled aliasing and an extended self-calibration. Aliasing artifacts are jointly resolved in ky-and kz-directions by balancing null space consistency with a low rank prior while enforcing data fidelity in 3D k-space. We demonstrated the proposed method outperforms competing methods for diffusion MRI at SMS=3, R=2.