Suchandrima Banerjee1, Ajit Shankaranarayanan1, Hsu-Lei Lee2, Krishna S. Nayak2, Sharmila Majumdar3, Eric T. Han1
1Applied Science Laboratory, GE
Healthcare, Menlo Park, CA, USA; 2Magnetic Resonance Engineering
Laboratory, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of
Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; 3Radiology and Biomedical
Imaging, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Balanced steady state free precession (SSFP) sequences are attractive because of their high SNR efficiency but are highly sensitive to off-resonance, experiencing signal nulls at intervals of 1/TR. When imaging trabecular bone micro-architecture with SSFP, the high-resolution acquisition necessitates long TRs. A multiple phase-cycled SSFP (m-SSFP) approach with 100% scan time penalty has previously been employed to avoid such banding artifacts. In this work we investigate if a wideband SSFP (w-SSFP) scheme can be used instead of m-SSFP to reduce off-resonance effects in less scan time. Initial results suggest that w-SSFP has strong potential as a faster alternative to m-SSFP.