Quantitative assessment of parallel acquisition techniques in diffusion tensor imaging at 3.0 Tesla

Single shot echo-planar based diffusion tensor imaging is prone to geometric and intensity distortions which scale with the magnetic field. Parallel imaging is a means of reducing these distortions while preserving spatial resolution. A quantitative comparison at 3 T of parallel imaging for diffusion tensor sequences using k-space (GRAPPA) and image domain (SENSE) reconstructions is reported here. Indices quantifying distortions, artifacts and reliability were compared for all voxels in the corpus callosum and showed that GRAPPA with an acceleration factor of 2 was the optimal sequence.