Comparative evaluation of zoomed and parallel diffusion-weighted imaging: A phantom study.

Authors

Akiyoshi Iwase, Yasuo Takatsu, Naoki Ohno, Azusa Kitao, Tosiaki Miyati

Published in

Journal of clinical imaging science. Volume 16. Pages 30. Epub Aug 10, 2026.

Abstract

Single-shot echo-planar imaging sequences with parallel imaging are widely used for diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). However, when small fields of view and higher phase-encoding reduction ratios (PRs) are applied, image quality may deteriorate because of imperfections in the unfolding process of parallel imaging. Previous studies have suggested that Zoomed DWI (Zoom-DWI) may address this limitation. Therefore, we compared Zoom-DWI with parallel DWI (Parallel-DWI) across different PRs to evaluate image quality.
Zoom-DWI and Parallel-DWI were performed using identical acquisition times and imaging parameters at different PRs. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), image uniformity, slice thickness, spatial resolution, and image distortion were evaluated.
At a PR of 66.6%, the SNR of Zoom-DWI was approximately 1.4-3.3-fold higher than that of Parallel-DWI at the image center, where reconstruction errors in parallel imaging become more pronounced as PR increases. Image uniformity was also higher in Zoom-DWI than in Parallel-DWI, and the difference increased by approximately 41.0% at a PR of 66.6%. Slice thickness, spatial resolution, and image distortion were comparable between the two methods.
In this phantom study, Zoom-DWI demonstrated higher SNR and greater image uniformity than Parallel-DWI, particularly at higher PRs and in the central image region.

PMID:
42694810
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 04 Sep 2026.

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