Fig. 1.

Example orderings and corresponding dot-product matrices H^TH. (a) The slice ordering for 100 slices corresponding to an optimized acquisition with skip-factor=3. The temporal order of the slice acquisition matches the anatomical order, but with each IR period the starting slice index is incremented by 3 such that in the first IR period the acquisition starts with slice 0, in the second IR period the acquisition starts with slice 3, and so on. (b) The slice orderings for 100 slices corresponding to an optimized acquisition in which the ordering is computed to maximize discriminability of the signal evolution across distinct tissues. (c) The dot-product matrix H^TH for a representative slice corresponding to the unoptimized case. The high values off the diagonal indicate poor discriminability. (d) The dot product matrix H^TH for the same slice corresponding to the optimized case shown in panel (b). Lower values off the diagonals of ~5% on average indicate improved discriminability.