SSFP Diffusion prepared SSFSE

Introduction The bright signal of fluid and blood can affect tumor detection in screening applications. Diffusion weighted EPI is now frequently employed to attenuate these signals and highlight tumors. Gradient pulses can also be added to unbalanced SSFP sequences to attenuate the signals with motion. It has been demonstrated that SSFP sequence is strongly sensitive to self-diffusion or other motions. However, the diffusion sensitive SSFP sequence is difficult to combine with other contrasts and with slow acquisition speed. Here, we implemented SSFP diffusion as a preparation sequence before the image acquisition to eliminate signals with fast diffusion. This preparation can be flexibly combined with any image acquisition and with faster acquisition speed.