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Abstract #4324

Intrinsic Diffusion Sensitivity of the bSSFP Signal: Influence of Strong Phase Encoding Gradients on Image SNR

Sbastien Br 1 , Matthias Weigel 1,2 , Jrgen Hennig 1 , Dominik Von Elverfeldt 1 , and Jochen Leupold 1

1 Department of Radiology, Medical Physics, University Hospital Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany, 2 Radiological Physics, University of Basel Hospital, Basel, Switzerland

Sub-millimeter image resolution, necessary in fields like molecular imaging, requires high gradient amplitudes of several hundred mT/m, mostly available at ultra-high field small animal scanner. The associated high b-values induce strong diffusion effects. Diffusion effects specific to the phase encoding gradients leading to modulation of the steady state signal were observed for a bSSFP sequence. In this work, we could observe an important loss of SNR in the images by comparing the theoretical expectation with the measurements. Simulations confirmed that this loss of SNR is associated to the diffusion effects of the PE gradients.

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