Diffusion imaging at 3.0 T with and without SENSE

Purpose: Diffusion imaging (DI) has become the cornerstone for the timely diagnosis of acute stroke. Still at 1.5T, diffusion imaging suffers from poor SNR. Moving from 1.5T to 3T significantly improves SNR, which may help improve sensitivity for subtle ADC changes. On the other hand, DI at 3T suffers from substantial image distortions, as susceptibility effects increase exponentially with field strength. An efficient approach to reduce susceptibility artifacts is by reducing echo train length in single shot DI by parallel imaging techniques such as SENSE (Sensitivity Encoding). We performed an intra-individual…