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

PURPOSE: To increase volume coverage in real-time MR thermometry for transcranial MR-guided focused ultrasound (tcMRgFUS) ablation, without multiple receive coils. THEORY AND METHODS: Multiband 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. RESULTS: Simulations showed that with large hot spots and identical magnitude images on each slice, up to three slices can be simultaneously imaged with less than 1∘ C temperature root-mean-square error. They also showed that hot spots do not alias coherently between slices, and that an average 86% of random slice-phase k-space permutations yielded less than 1∘ C temperature error. Temperature precision was not degraded compared to single-slice imaging in the in vivo SMS scans, and the gel phantom SMS temperature maps closely tracked single-slice temperature in the hot spot, with no coherent aliasing to other slices. CONCLUSIONS: Incoherent 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.