Fast Non-Linear PTx Pulse Design with Integrated Peak Local RF Energy Minimization

Rene Gumbrecht¹, ², Hans-Peter Fautz¹

For ultra-high field strengths of 7T and above and especially for parallel transmission, tissue heating due to RF field exposure is a dominant limiting factor for high performance human imaging. However, most current pulse design methods use a constraint on forward RF energy to find a trade-off between excitation quality and RF energy deposition. The goal of this study is to optimize the flip-angle distribution of non-linear high flip-angle RF pulses, such as composite pulses for parallel transmission, and to minimize the peak local RF energy at the same time in one run of a non-linear solver.