Prospective acceleration of whole-brain chemical exchange saturation transfer by Joint K-space and Image-space Parallel Imaging (KIPI)

The clinical use of chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) imaging is limited by its relatively long scan time due to the measurements of multiple frames at the same location, especially for 3D whole-brain imaging. In this study, the recently proposed reconstruction method by joint K-space and Image-space Parallel Imaging (KIPI) is utilized for prospectively accelerating 3D CEST imaging. Prospective KIPI allows an acceleration factor of up to 8-fold for acquiring source images, reducing the scan time to 5.5 min for the whole-brain quantitative CEST imaging, with 17 saturation frames and 2.9 mm isotropic resolution.