Abstract #4947

Combined Excitation and Partial Saturation to Reduce Inflow Enhancement

Misung Han^1,2, Brian A. Hargreaves¹

¹Radiology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States; ²Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States

Partially saturating outer slab upstream can reduce inflow enhancement and pulsatile ghost artifacts by preparing flowing spins to a steady state before entering the imaging slab. However, adding another RF pulse and spoilers increases scan time. Here, we present a short RF pulse that simultaneously excites the imaging slab and partially saturates the outer slab. This pulse was designed and demonstrated by phantom and in vivo experiments for the RF-spoiled gradient echo sequence.