Martin Janich1,2, Olaf Dssel1, Sascha Khler2, Johannes Schneider2, Peter Ullmann2
1Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany; 2Bruker BioSpin MRI GmbH, Ettlingen, Germany
A common approach to B1+ characterization of TX-arrays involves transmitting with different combinations of array elements in order to improve SNR. TX-element combination can be employed in a more sophisticated manner when using a B1+ mapping method based on saturation and excitation pulses. The saturation can be performed with a single transmit element and the excitation with a B1+-shimmed combination. The present study proposes improvements to the common combined transmission approach for TX-array B1+ mapping as well as for the saturation-based technique. The performance of the improved techniques was experimentally compared to the classical single-element B1+ mapping approach.
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