Calibrationless multi-slice Cartesian MRI via orthogonally alternating phase encoding direction and joint low-rank tensor completion

We propose a multi-slice acquisition with orthogonally alternating phase encoding (PE) direction and subsequent joint calibrationless reconstruction for accelerated multiple individual 2D slices or multi-slice 2D Cartesian MRI. Specifically, multi-slice multi-channel data are first acquired with random or uniform PE undersampling while orthogonally alternating PE direction between adjacent slices. They are then jointly reconstructed through a recently developed low-rank multi-slice Hankel tensor completion (MS-HTC) approach. The proposed acquisition and reconstruction strategy was evaluated with human brain MR data. It effectively suppressed aliasing artifacts even at high acceleration factor, outperforming the existing MS-HTC approach, where PE direction is the same between adjacent slices. More importantly, the new strategy worked robustly with uniform undersampling or random undersampling without any consecutive central k-space lines. In summary, our proposed multi-slice MRI strategy exploits both coil sensitivity and image content similarities across adjacent slices. Orthogonally alternating PE direction among slices substantially facilitates the low-rank completion process and improves image reconstruction quality. This new strategy is applicable to uniform and random PE undersampling. It can be easily implemented in practice for Cartesian parallel imaging of multiple individual 2D slices without any coil sensitivity calibration.