Orthogonalizing crusher and diffusion‐encoding gradients to suppress undesired echo pathways in the twice‐refocused spin echo diffusion sequence

Abstract

The twice-refocused spin echo sequence is widely used in diffusion imaging due to its excellent performance in reducing eddy currents. The three radio frequency pulses give rise to eight separate signal pathways. Because there is no general solution for the size and arrangement for crusher gradients, with constant size and orientation, that is effective for all arbitrary diffusion-sensitizing b-values and directions, this article introduces and validates a solution whereby the crusher and diffusion-encoding gradients are always kept orthogonal, thus ensuring their independence. The cancellation of the crusher and diffusion gradients was demonstrated. Subsequently, crusher gradients were implemented in such a way that they were always orthogonal to the diffusion gradient. Phantom and in-vivo experiments were performed to ascertain that orthogonally implemented crusher gradients alleviate the problem without lowering image quality. In all experiments, when the crusher gradients' action was cancelled by the diffusion-encoding gradients artifactual signal modulation was observed. When orthogonal gradients were implemented the artifacts were eliminated without detrimental effects on image quality. Orthogonal crushers are easy to implement and can be used for any variant of diffusion imaging sequences (e.g., diffusion tensor imaging, fiber diameter mapping) where the twice-refocused scheme is used.