Quantitative and Comparative Evaluation of 2D Reduced-FOV Multi-shot Diffusion Tensor Imaging in Spinal Cord

Motivation: To our best knowledge, there has yet to be a comprehensive evaluation of the combination of cardiac triggering, reduced-FOV, or multi-shot techniques together for improving spinal cord DTI. Goal(s): This study aims to compare the performances of spinal cord DTI with different parametric combinations. Approach: Extensive and comparative experiments in five aspects were conducted. Results: Results demonstrate that multi-shot DTI with MUSE could achieve better reconstruction in the spinal cord. A combination of reduced-FOV and multi-shot techniques could be adopted simultaneously in pursuit of ultimate distortion correction. In addition, cardiac triggering should be equipped to reduce the influences on cerebrospinal fluid pulsation. Impact: Multi-shot DTI with MUSE and cardiac triggering might be the optimal combination for clinical diagnosis of the spinal cord if available on commercial MRI scanners. Future coil design could focus on customized coil arrangement of the spinal cord for optimization.