Ramkumar Krishnamurthy1, Amol Pednekar2,
Marc Kouwenhoven3, Paul Harvey3, Claudio Arena4,
Benjamin Cheong4, Raja Muthupillai4
1Bioengineering, Rice
University, Houston, TX, United States; 2Philips Healthcare,
Houston, TX, United States; 3Philips Healthcare, Best,
Netherlands; 4Diagnostic & Interventional Radiology, St.
Luke's Episcopal Hospital, Houston, TX, United States
In this prospective study we quantitatively evaluated the performance of a regional RF shimming approach that exploits the ability to independently modulate the amplitudes and phases of two RF transmit channels at 3.0T for cardiovascular MR applications. The results from this study of 11 subjects show that: (a) greater than 20% variations in flip angle exist even in as small a region as the heart and can cause substantial shading artifact; (b) RF shimming using a multi-channel RF transmit system is feasible, and quantitative metrics show a robust improvement in B1 homogeneity across the region of interest.
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