UTE Excitation Pulses Followed by Spin Lock to Preserve Magnetization

Michael Carl¹, Mark Bydder², Atsushi Takahashi¹, Eric Han¹, Graeme Bydder²

UTE excitation usually operates near the maximum gradient slew-rates and can cause transient short-term eddy currents and gradient amplifier non-linearities that can last from tens to hundreds of microseconds and thus may produce image artifacts. We propose a sequence in which the original UTE excitation pulse is immediately followed by a spin lock pulse, applied 90 out of phase with the excitation pulse to allow the transients to decay away. We have investigated this approach by studying the results of Bloch simulations.