Simultaneous Multi-slice Single-shot Spiral Acquisitions for Accelerated Diffusion-weighted Imaging

Single-shot acquisition techniques are commonly used to acquire diffusion-weighted images due to their high sampling efficiency. Single-shot uniform-density spiral sampling combined with in-plane under-sampling has been used to achieve diffusion imaging. In this study, we investigated simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) -accelerated single-shot spiral imaging (SMS-SSH-Spiral) to further improve the scan efficiency of DWI. The in vivo results demonstrate the feasibility of SMS-SSH-Spiral acquisitions for diffusion tensor imaging with 2-fold slice acceleration and 3-fold in-plane acceleration. Diffusion data with 1.5mm isotropic resolution is acquired using our multi-band single-shot acquisition strategy.