Pseudo Partition-encoded Simultaneous Multislab (pPRISM) for Submillimeter Diffusion Imaging Without Navigator and Slab-Boundary Artifacts

The ability to achieve submillimter isotropic resolution diffusion MR imaging (dMRI) is critically important to study fine-scale brain structures. While the multi-shot approaches, including SMSlab and gSlider-SMS, have been proposed to mitigate the inherently low SNR, the SMSlab sequences require additional navigators for phase estimation and both SMSlab and gSlider-SMS suffered from the slab-boundary artifacts. This study proposed two new concepts: PRISM encoding and 2) pseudo slab in order to mitigate the slab-boundary artifacts and shorten the scan time. Together, this study achieved the dMRI with 0.86 mm isotropic resolution with 16.3%-43.6% reduction of scan time compared to gSlider.