Pascal Pawel Stang1, Adam Kerr1, William Grissom1, John Mark Pauly1, Greig Cameron Scott1
1Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Transmit arrays hold growing promise for MRI by enabling improved safety, RF homogeneity, selectivity, and pulse acceleration. Yet, achieving good performance with complex Transmit-SENSE pulses requires that array channels be characterized, closely calibrated, and decoupled. We propose Vector Iterative Pre-distortion (VIP), a multi-channel iterative correction method which pre-distorts RF amplifier input to achieve desired output at the coil. VIP uses current sensor feedback to detect and correct errors in the transmit path yielding substantially improved RF fidelity. We successfully demonstrate VIP as general method for correcting non-ideal transmit path performance, and show improved Transmit-SENSE results when using the method.