Figure 1: Sequence employed for the 3D SPEN DTI acquisitions, including a 180˚ chirp pulse acting in the presence of a gradient that encodes the more artifact-prone, low bandwidth dimension, a pre-encoding Ta/2 delay introduced for achieving SPEN’s full-refocusing condition where variable-orientation diffusion-weighting gradients (red) are placed, and gradients for interleaving and phase-encoding procedures. A final, 2D echo-based reacquisition of the k=0 PE line was included for all interleaves, for correcting motion phase distortions in these experiments.

Figure 3: Comparison between in vivo EPI and SPEN images extracted from 3D DTI acquisitions on a 2-days-old live mouse. The in-plane fields targeted in both experiments were 10x10 mm.