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Abstract #0253

Reduction of Acoustic Noise to Improve Patient Comfort Through Optimized Sequence Design

Eric Yann Pierre1, David Manuel Grodzki2, Bjoern Heismann2, Vikas Gulani, 13, Jeffrey Sunshine4, Kecheng Liu5, Mark A. Griswold, 14

1Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States; 2Siemens AG, Erlangen, Germany; 3Radiology, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Cleveland, OH, United States; 4Radiology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States; 5Siemens Medical Solutions, USA Inc., Malvern, PA, United States


Loud acoustic noise is a major cause of patient discomfort. It is mainly introduced during gradient switching, and many efforts have been made to address this issue. Some MR manufacturers encloses the whole gradient coil in a vacuum environment to reduce the noise significantly, increasing manufacturing costs. We present another approach without hardware modification, which relies solely on the optimization of pulse sequences to realize noise reduction for various standard clinical protocols. No significant degradation of imaging time or image quality was observed. With such an approach, for certain specific sequences, acoustic noise can be reduced almost to ambient level.