Our proposal aimed at creating a new method capable of further improving the performance of MRI, based on cross-term Spatiotemporal-Encoding (xSPEN) principles. xSPEN is a new approach stemming from our AdG ERC activities on nuclear magnetic resonance, that we originally developed for the single-shot acquisition of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. In its original implementation we found that xSPEN could deal with field distortions that are orders-of-magnitude larger than those of all its predecessors, leading to a potentially unprecedented tool for single-scan MRI acquisitions. This PoC grant sought to exploit the new opportunities that xSPEN could open. Based on such workplan, this Project focused on writing and disseminating xSPEN single-shot experiments over a wide range of preclinical and clinical platforms, compatible with thousands of MRI scanners nowadays in use. Concurrently, systematic analyses on the possibility of extending xSPEN single-shot MRI experiments to multi-shot acquisitions, were jump-started. As a result of these investigations, an unusual ability to undersample volumetric MRI data sets without introducing artifacts was discovered; accompanying this was a much reduced power deposition vis-à-vis comparable clinical 3D sequences. All this is being exploited as a new route to high field clinical MRI, with the goal of achieving mm or sub-mm isotropic resolutions with ≈1min scanning time scales.
