Hello! Welcome to the EPTI project website! We are posting updates, developments, and available sequence and reconstruction of EPTI on this website.

Echo Planar Time-resolved Imaging

EPI has been one of the most-widely used MRI acquisition and the standard readout employed nearly universally by functional and diffusion MRI practitioners. However, it comes with intrinsic limitations, such as commonly-known distortion, blurring and limited number of echoes, which severely compromise its image quality and information content.

Recently, EPTI has been developed as the next-generation EPI readout to address these limitations, which not only provides images completely free from distortion and T2/T2* blurring, but also generates densely-sampled multi-echo multi-contrast images with high readout efficiency.

As EPTI continues to make a greater impact and attracts more interests from researchers around the world, we aim to create this website to serve as a resource for people seeking to learn more about this technology. We value any feedback and look forward to the opportunity to communicate and collaborate with you!

What is EPTI?

EPTI is a novel MRI acquisition technique that provides distortion/blurring-free multi-echo multi-contrast imaging. It recognizes the strong spatiotemporal data correlation within the readout and efficiently encodes in a spatiotemporal domain, which allows it to replace the conventional EPI image formation and resolves multi-echo images free from artifacts associated with the accumulated imperfections. This turns a liability—the evolution of the MR signal with time, which yields distortion/blurring—into an asset, providing unique benefits and features, inlcuding distortion- and blurring-free, multi-echo images with a wide range of TEs, and high readout efficiency.

Why EPTI?

EPTI can be readily applied as a readout in different MRI contrast acquisition. The advantages of EPTI include:

• distortion-free, T2/T2*-blurring-free;

• Multi-echo multi-contrast images with flexible TEs (e.g., from 3 ms to 120 ms): providing continuous signal evolution to study TE depedent information or fit quantitative parameters such as T1, T2, T2*.

• Continuous readout with minimal deadtime --> high readout efficiency --> high tSNR/CNR efficiency;

• Pure contrast images resolved at the exact TEs with minimal contrast contamination: e.g., to obatin pure T2 BOLD, VASO or ASL without BOLD contamination for high fMRI specificity.

These features can benefit a number of MRI applications, and a few examples are shown below.

Grant Support

We are supported by a NIH NINDS BRAIN Initiative U24 grant to develop and disseminate EPTI for functional MRI.