Determining slice leakage in accelerated magnetic resonance imaging

A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) apparatus comprising:

• static and gradient magnetic field generators and a plurality of radio frequency (RF) coils disposed within said magnetic field generators, the RF coils having respectively associated known RF signal reception sensitivity fields;
• RF transmitter and RF receiver circuits coupled to said RF coils;
• and
• an MRI sequence controller including a k-space memory and at least one processor configured to control said magnetic field generators and said RF transmitter and receiver circuits to:
• reconstruct MRI image domain data from k-space MRI data acquired from said RF coils, MR signal contributions from one slice having been multiplexed into a plurality of slices in reconstructed image domain MRI data;
• access said MRI image domain data nominally representing at least one slice of a region of interest (ROI);
• process said one slice of accessed MRI image domain data by input to a sensitivity encoding (SENSE) un-aliasing matrix built from predetermined RF signal reception sensitivity maps for multiple RF MR signal receiving coils used to acquire MRI data to be processed, thereby producing as matrix output SENSE-decoded MRI image domain data for one pass through image slice and at least one extra slice;
• and
• determine inter-slice leakage and/or in-plane residual aliasing based on content of said at least one extra output slice from the SENSE-decoded MRI image domain data.

A non-transitory computer readable storage medium having stored therein instructions that, when executed by a computer processor having access to memory and said stored instructions, causes the computer to perform a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image domain operations for processing MRI images reconstructed from k-space MRI data acquired from multiple magnetic resonance (MR) radio frequency (RF) signal receiving coils having respectively associated known RF signal reception sensitivity fields, MR signal contributions from one slice having been multiplexed into a plurality of slices in reconstructed image domain MRI data to be processed, wherein the operations include:

• accessing MRI image domain data nominally representing at least one slice of a region of interest (ROI);
• processing said one slice of accessed MRI image domain data by input to a sensitivity encoding (SENSE) un-aliasing matrix built from predetermined RF signal reception sensitivity maps for multiple RF MR signal receiving coils used to acquire MRI data to be processed, thereby producing as matrix output SENSE-decoded MRI image domain data for one pass through image slice and at least one extra slice;
• and
• determining inter-slice leakage and/or in-plane residual aliasing based on content of said at least one extra output slice from the SENSE-decoded MRI image domain data.