Simple Cross-Solution for Banding Artifact Removal in BSSFP Imaging

Qing-San Xiang^1,2, Michael N. Hoff²

Balanced SSFP imaging (or TrueFISP, FIESTA) has broad clinical applications for its high time efficiency and desirable contrast. Unfortunately, banding artifacts are often seen in bSSFP images as signal modulation due to B0 inhomogeneity. To reduce banding, phase-cycled bSSFP acquisitions have been used with various reconstruction algorithms, such as Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP), Sum of Squares (SOS), Nonlinear Averaging (NLA), and Complex Sum (CS). However, none of these techniques remove banding completely. In this work, a novel elliptical signal model and a simple analytical Cross-Solution (XS) are presented. The latter is able to remove banding artifacts completely.