Abstract #3004

Lu A, Josan S, Pauly J, Daniel B, Butts K

Half RF pulses used in ultrashort T2 imaging are very sensitive to eddy currents. This work investigates a double half RF pulse in which each excitation is a full pulse split in time, so that long T2s are excited by a full sinc pulse while short T2s are excited by a half pulse. The resulting improved slice selectivity of the long T2s reduces out of slice contribution to the signal, which helps in short T2 quantitation. The short T2 behavior is similar to the normal half pulse. Results from phantom and in-vivo measurements are presented.