Spiral parallel magnetic resonance imaging

Spiral k-space scanning is a rapid magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that can provide an order of magnitude reduction in scan time compared to conventional spin warp techniques. Parallel imaging is another method for reducing scan time that exploits spatially varying radiofrequency (RF) coil sensitivities to reduce the amount of data required to reconstruct an image. Combining spiral scanning with parallel imaging provide a scan time reduction factor that is the product of the reduction factors for each of the techniques and thus can permit very rapid imaging Image reconstruction for spiral parallel MRI is more involved than for spin warp parallel MRI and is an area of active research. Two techniques for performing this image reconstruction are PILS, a simple image-domain method that relies on localized coil sensitivities, and BOSCO, a method that is based on successive convolution operations in k-space.