Respiratory triggered diffusion-weighted imaging with a single diffusion sensitising gradient to reduce image acquisition time – A feasibility study in the workup of hepatocellular carcinoma

Highlights: • Respiratory triggering, which is often used to improve image quality in diffusion imaging, has a significant time dividend. • Utilising diffusion sensitising gradient in a single direction with respiratory triggering can reduce image acquisition times. • Images acquired with a single diffusion sensitising gradient had no significant differences in images quality or diagnostic accuracies. We evaluated respiratory triggered unidirectional single-shot echo-planar imaging (u-SSEPI) as a time-saving measure in diffusion imaging of the upper abdomen. Specifically, we compared the ADC values obtained from unidirectional DWI (u-SSEPI) and routine DWI (4t-SSEPI) and also the diagnostic accuracies of unidirectional and routine DWI sequences in the identification of focal liver lesions in the setting of chronic liver disease (CLD).