Acceleration of Simultaneous Multislice Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting With Spatiotemporal Convolutional Neural Network.

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Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) can be accelerated with simultaneous multislice (SMS) imaging for joint T1 and T2 quantification. However, the high inter-slice and in-plane acceleration in SMS-MRF causes severe aliasing artifacts, limiting the multiband (MB) factors to typically 2 or 3. Deep learning has demonstrated superior performance compared to the conventional dictionary matching approach for single-slice MRF, but its effectiveness in SMS-MRF remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduced a new deep learning approach with decoupled spatiotemporal feature learning for SMS-MRF to achieve high MB factors for accurate and volumetric T1 and T2 quantification in neuroimaging. The proposed method leverages information from both spatial and temporal domains to mitigate the significant aliasing in SMS-MRF. Neural networks, trained using either acquired SMS-MRF data or simulated data generated from single-slice MRF acquisitions, were evaluated. The performance was further compared with both dictionary matching and a deep learning approach based on residual channel attention U-Net. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method, trained with acquired SMS-MRF data, achieves the best performance in brain T1 and T2 quantification, outperforming dictionary matching and residual channel attention U-Net. With a MB factor of 4, rapid T1 and T2 mapping was achieved with 1.5 s per slice for quantitative brain imaging.