MRI Shells Trajectory Acquisition for Off-Resonance Blurring

The patent segments the k-space acquisition into multiple interleaved shells, where each shell is acquired during a separate TR period. This segmentation allows the total readout duration to be distributed across multiple shorter acquisitions, reducing off-resonance blurring within each individual readout while still achieving complete k-space coverage through the combination of all shells.

The patent employs periodic repetition of the shell acquisition sequence across multiple TR periods, with each period acquiring a different interleaved shell. This periodic action enables the system to accumulate sufficient k-space data over time without requiring any single readout to be excessively long, thereby maintaining both image quality and minimizing off-resonance effects.

The patent segments the k-space into multiple spherical shells and acquires them in an interleaved manner across different TR periods. This segmentation allows undersampling within each individual shell acquisition while ensuring that the combined data from all shells provides sufficient sampling density to reconstruct high-quality images without severe aliasing artifacts.

The patent applies different sampling strategies to different regions of k-space by using variable density within each shell, with higher sampling density near the center of each shell and lower density at the periphery. This local quality approach optimizes the tradeoff between scan time and image quality by concentrating sampling efforts where they are most needed while accepting lower sampling in regions that contribute less to overall image fidelity.