Parallel imaging in magnetic resonance imaging

Parallel imaging is a new, innovative technique to accelerate magnetic resonance imaging without affecting the image contrast. Unlike traditional methods, this acceleration is not achieved by faster gradient hardware, rather parallel imaging uses the spatial information of multiple receiver coils. This allows for the acquisition of multiple phase encoding from a single signal echo, so that fewer phase encoding steps are needed for obtaining the same image information. This article gives an introduction to parallel imaging and its major applications, and provides an outlook into the future perspectives for these techniques. (orig.)