3D Distortionless Diffusion Weighted Imaging in the Prostate using a Diffusion Prepared Fast Spin-Echo Sequence

Diffusion-Weighted Imaging (DWI) of the prostate is commonly used for tumor detection and characterization. However, the echo planar imaging (EPI) based DWI methods commonly used in prostate imaging fail in the setting of field inhomogeneities most related to hip prosthesis and rectal gas. Cartesian Fast Spin-Echo (FSE) is an alternative to EPI that is more robust to off-resonance. In this study, we compare in vivo 3D FSE to multi-shot EPI (MUSE) for DWI prostate imaging, demonstrating that an FSE DWI sequence achieves high image quality while avoiding geometric distortion seen in EPI based DWI.