Bu Sik Park1,2, Kyunghyun Sung3, John McGarrity2, Zhipeng Cao2,4, Sukhoon Oh2, Mark Watson5, Scott Schilliak5, Labros Petropolous5, Christopher M. Collins2,4
1Bioengineering , The Pennsylvania State University, Hershey, PA, USA; 2Radiology, The Pennsylvania State University, Hershey, PA, USA; 3Radiology, Standford University, Stanford, CA, USA; 4Bioengineering, The Pennsylvania State University, Hershey, PA, USA; 5MR Instruments Inc., Minneapolis, MN, USA
To overcome challenges of inhomogeneous transmit B1 distribution and high specific absorption rate (SAR) at high field, we present a slice-selective array-optimized composite pulse designed to both improve B1 uniformity and reduce SAR using an 8-channel transmit head array loaded with a head model, and compare our result with the conventional quadrature driving method at 3T. The sequence was implemented on a 3D MRI simulator currently under development, and showed improvement in excitation uniformity and SAR compared to a conventional birdcage coil.