12 Parallel imaging

Parallel imaging is old news now, but it was super exciting in the first decade of the 21st century. Suddenly we could acquire high-resolution images with short enough read-out times that we could keep distortion and drop-out under control! We’ll start with a brief introduction to parallel imaging, to define the concept of undersampling.

When making decisions about parallel imaging, you need to know what R is, what g factors are, and how these two factors impact your signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

And finally … if you’re doing 2D imaging, parallel imaging doesn’t help you with coverage in the through-slice direction. For that, there’s Mulitband!