Abstract #0253

Reduction of Acoustic Noise to Improve Patient Comfort Through Optimized Sequence Design

Eric Yann Pierre¹, David Manuel Grodzki², Bjoern Heismann², Vikas Gulani,¹³, Jeffrey Sunshine⁴, Kecheng Liu⁵, Mark A. Griswold,¹⁴

¹Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States; ²Siemens AG, Erlangen, Germany; ³Radiology, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Cleveland, OH, United States; ⁴Radiology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, United States; ⁵Siemens Medical Solutions, USA Inc., Malvern, PA, United States

Loud acoustic noise is a major cause of patient discomfort. It is mainly introduced during gradient switching, and many efforts have been made to address this issue. Some MR manufacturers encloses the whole gradient coil in a vacuum environment to reduce the noise significantly, increasing manufacturing costs. We present another approach without hardware modification, which relies solely on the optimization of pulse sequences to realize noise reduction for various standard clinical protocols. No significant degradation of imaging time or image quality was observed. With such an approach, for certain specific sequences, acoustic noise can be reduced almost to ambient level.