Fig.4: Comparison of SER with other methods for eleven slices - the top row shows vendor-provided gold standard spin-echo (SE), a turbo SE with an ETL of 7 and a GRAPPA factor of 6, a half-Fourier acquisition single-shot TSE (HASTE) at echo times (TE) shown in red font. The corresponding acquisition times (T_acq) are shown in yellow font and were recorded from the vendor’s user interface. The bottom row shows the corresponding images at TEs close to 80ms allowed by the vendor. SER images acquired using pypulseq at similar slice locations, do not suffer from saturation or blurring artifacts.

Fig. 5: Single echo reconstruction (SER) imaging performance a) SER provides the fastest acquisition time for the four methods, depends on echo time (TE) rather than repetition time (TR) and phase encoding steps, and is faster than TSE + GRAPPA by an order of magnitude; b) SER delivers the lowest RF power to the phantom among the methods, due to the one-time use of the 90⁰ and 180⁰ pulse; c) SER is the most silent scan with the least peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) percentage due to the one-time use of the readout gradient