Simultaneous multislice MRI thermometry with a single coil using incoherent blipped-controlled aliasing.

purposeTo increase volume coverage in real-time MR thermometry for transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound (tcMRgFUS) ablation, without multiple receive coils. THEORY AND

methodsMultiband excitation and incoherent blipped-controlled aliasing were implemented in a 2DFT pulse sequence used clinically for tcMRgFUS, and an extended k-space hybrid reconstruction was developed that recovers slice-separated temperature maps assuming that heating is focal, given slice-separated pretreatment images. Simulations were performed to characterize slice leakage, the number of slices that can be simultaneously imaged with low-temperature error, and robustness across random slice-phase k-space permutations. In vivo experiments were performed using a single receive coil without heating to measure temperature precision, and gel phantom FUS experiments were performed to test the method with heating and with a water bath.

resultsSimulations showed that with large hot spots and identical magnitude images on each slice, up to three slices can be simultaneously imaged with less than

conclusionsIncoherent controlled aliasing SMS enables accurate reconstruction of focal heating maps from two or three slices simultaneously, using a single receive coil and a sparsity-promoting temperature reconstruction.