Practical considerations for in vivo MRI with higher dimensional spatial encoding

Object This work seeks to examine practical aspects of in vivo imaging when spatial encoding is performed with three or more encoding channels for a 2D image. Materials and methods The recently developed 4-Dimensional Radial In/Out (4D-RIO) trajectory is compared in simulations to an alternative higher-order encoding scheme referred to as O-space imaging. Direct comparison of local k-space representations leads to the proposal of a modification to the O-space imaging trajectory based on a scheme of prephasing to improve the reconstructed image quality. Data were collected using a 4D-RIO acquisition in vivo in the human brain and several image reconstructions were compared, exploiting the property that the dense encoding matrix, after a 1D or 2D Fourier transform, can be approximated by a sparse matrix by discarding entries below a chosen magnitude. Results The proposed prephasing scheme for the O-space trajectory shows a marked improvement in quality in the simulated image reconstruction. In experiments, 4D-RIO data acquired in vivo in the human brain can be reconstructed to a reasonable quality using only 5 % of the encoding matrix—massively reducing computer memory requirements for a practical reconstruction. Conclusion Trajectory design and reconstruction techniques such as these may prove especially useful when extending generalized higher-order encoding methods to 3D images