Christian Matthies1, Armin M. Nagel1, Lothar R. Schad2, Peter Bachert1
1Medical Physics in Radiology, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; 2Chair in Computer Assisted Clinical Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany
For diagnostic purposes, in sodium (23Na) MRI, the discrimination between free sodium ions and sodium ions restricted in their mobility is desirable. One method to isolate the signal from such ions is triple-quantum filtered sodium MRI. However, a problem connected with this method is the pronounced sensitivity to inhomogeneities in the B0 field. To reduce the influence of the latter, pulse phases must be chosen carefully. We propose a fast method to find optimal values for the pulse phases before measurement and acquire triple-quantum filtered sodium images of the human head.
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