Reducing oblique flow effects in interleaved EPI with a centric reorderingtechnique

Segmented interleaved echo planar imaging offers a fast and efficient appro ach to magnetic resonance angiography, Unfortunately, this technique Is par ticularly sensitive to oblique flow in the imaging plane, In this work, a m athematical analysis of oblique flow effects for several types of k-space c overage is presented, The conventional linear acquisition scheme, an altern ating centric and a nonalternating centric encoding scheme are compared wit h respect to their flow properties. It is shown both by simulations and ima ging experiments that artifacts from oblique in-plane flow are effectively reduced by both centric reordered phase-encoding schemes, The nonalternatin g centric acquisition scheme is preferred to the alternating centric scheme due to the smoother phase error transition in k-space in the presence of o bliquely-angled flow, Magn Reson Med 45:623-629, 2001, (C) 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.