Leveraging redundancy in simultaneous multislice acquisitions to improve spike detection.

This study demonstrates that the SMS criterion reduced the number of outliers reported to a manageable level while accurately identifying low-level spike artifacts. Successfully identifying low-level spikes allows early detection of hardware problems that can be fixed before the problem becomes debilitating and corrupts data. As part of a daily quality assurance protocol, the method prevents the need to retrospectively carry out time-intensive despiking and reanalysis of data.