Signal gain by reduction of the concomitant phase in double diffusion encoding by means of added oscillating gradients

Intravoxel dephasing generated by Maxwell or concomitant fields can cause image artifacts like signal voids or falsify the quantification. In this study, an optimization scheme to reduce concomitant field effects in diffusion sequences with single pairs of bipolar gradients on each axis is presented. Oscillating gradients are added onto the original gradient pulses with the aim of reducing the concomitant phase without significant changes in the sequence properties. The proposed method is evaluated in both measurements and simulations, and gives rise to a positive effect on the signal for arbitrary diffusion wave vector pairs.