Accelerated multislice MRI with patterned excitation

Motivation: Accelerate spin echo multi-slice MRI. Goal(s): Combine echo dephasing and rephasing segments of different slices to reduce scan time. Approach: Use a composite RF pulse to excite upcoming slices while refocusing signal from a current slice. Results: Implementations at 3 T for spin echo based displacement encoding and spin echo and stimulated echo based DTI show 2-3 fold acceleration. Impact: The proposed technique can accelerate 2D multi-slice imaging techniques that rely on multiple RF pulses per slice for signal generation and acquisition. It can be combined with simultaneous multi-slice and SENSE approaches for additional acceleration.