Synopsis

Echo-Planar Imaging (EPI) is a technique devised around 1976 by the Nobel laureate Sir Peter Mansfield. In the 1980s it was a promising but challenging new MRI technique. By 1990, it got clinically (and commercially) useful, initially mainly via diffusion imaging. Issues became problems – having a problem, we come up with solutions. One of the most challenging problems is the “EPI ghost” (or half-FOV ghost). As of the 1990s, this was tackled by a reference-scan. In the 2000s, parallel imaging became an additional tool against the ghost, while the last decade brought deep-learning as an additional possibility.